Difference between revisions of "Chris and art"

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[[Image:001-Christophers1stSonic.jpg|thumb|Chris's first known drawing from when he was <strike>5</strike> 15.]]
{{quote|My art style, I feel, is one that would be typically mistaken as child-like, yet there is an elegance that gives its simplicity an appealing charm. This is a style that needs not be overthought, as it is typically to the point.|[[Chris]], talking about his art<ref>[[January 2020 social media posts]]</ref>}}
[[File:Goddess at work by nightstarrosechu2891 dg6od9g-414w-2x.jpg|thumb|"Goddess At Work" (2022), showing Chris working on comic pages in his work room at [[14 Branchland Court]].]]
[[File:MyMindIsABlank.jpg|thumb|''[[January 2015 Facebook posts#He Hasn't Forgotten Us!|My Mind Is a Blank]]'', January 2015]]
 
[[File:CWCPeterPaulRubens.png|thumb|How Chris sees his self-portraits.]]
 
'''Art''' has been, and always will be, Chris's selling point. Chris has been involved with some form of art or another throughout his life. He has taken numerous art and design classes in [[high school]], and he holds a degree in [[CADD|computer-aided drafting and design]]. But despite his extensive education in the visual arts (and relative lack of other discernible skills), his style is quite unique, to say the least.
 
Ever since the very day [[Jason Kendrick Howell]] found out about Chris's creation of [[Sonichu (character)|Sonichu]], many people have taken interest in Chris because of his infamously bad artwork. Ironically, his crude creative abilities are what made him stand out as an artist. ''Sonichu'' wouldn't be ''Sonichu'' without Chris's art. Encouraging Chris to produce more of it remains a popular objective amongst [[troll]]s and [[ween]]s.
 
 
==Before we get started with today's critique...==
It can be easy to simply write off Chris as a bad artist without asking why. But of course, visual art is subjective – there are a multitude of reasons ''why'' someone might not like a particular work, and there are bound to be people who will like it. Different styles suit different artists (and viewers), and realism isn't exactly the gold standard of good art. The fact that people [[commissions|commission]] Chris is proof that he isn't objectively a failed artist. After all, he sold more art than Van Gogh ever did in his lifetime.
 
Chris is no [[Naïve|naive]] artist – he took art classes throughout his schooling. He is most likely familiar with the process of artistic critiques in an academic setting. This article will reflect that process.
 
Instead of outright praising or bashing Chris's art, this critique will offer constructive criticism. It will examine strong and weak points of Chris's art in an objective, taste-neutral manner. It will examine all media but place special emphasis on his most proficient medium: drawing. The article will also consider the context of Chris's art. Finally, it will consider ways he has improved his craft, aspects that can be improved, and techniques he is outright unwilling to improve.
 
==Weak points==
 
===Exercise of skills and improvement in craft===
[[Image:0025-ChristophersMicroMornings.jpg|thumb|left|Not bad for a grade-schooler.]]
 
Chris does not seem to consider his artistic skill in need of revision; he is always fully satisfied by the first attempt at a drawing he makes. Naturally, being an artist of that caliber, Chris takes it upon himself to criticize the art that his [[True and Loyal Fanbase]] send to him, and is quick to point out the myriad of "flaws" in each work.<ref>[[Ivy Q&A#After Emily]]</ref><ref>[[CWC Personal Sonichu Presentation#Part 2]]</ref>
 
Chris has said he spends "an hour at most" drawing a comic page and about a half-hour coloring it.<ref>[[Mailbag 2#In which Chris insults someone who drew a picture for him]]</ref> He does not seem to be aware of the fact that producing the kind of high-quality artwork that fans expect in a good comic strip is very labor-intensive and can easily take hours, sometimes days, even with professional software programs like Photoshop. He also doesn't seem to understand, or care, that any good artist will draw a scene multiple times before they publish it, especially if there are mistakes. In pretty much any episode of ''Sonichu'', you will be sure to find at least one mistake Chris has made that he refuses to redo and simply colors over. One good example is the scene from Chris and Ivy [[Giant Penis Comic|going to a hotel for hanky-panky]].<ref>[[:File:SchuComicSP3P5.jpg]]</ref> If you look at the scene, you can see multiple mistakes that any artist would have seen as a reason to redo the picture. Chris started to draw his balls (via tracing), but decided he didn't like the proportions that presented, so he decided to keep the start of the trace and just add some "speed lines". If you look at the picture of Ivy you will see that Chris messed up a bit around her face but decided that instead of redoing it, he'd just color over it. He also messed up a bit on her right breast; he drew one too small and decided to make it bigger, by just adding another curved line.
 
At times, he would expand ''Sonichu'' stories in summary form on [[CWCipedia]], a medium better equipped to keep up with his racing, easily distracted imagination. Everything he says or writes, he considers being a part of his comic's continuity partly because it is easier to record these euphoric and fleeting bouts of inspiration as they occur rather than days, weeks, months, or even years later in comic form.
 
Chris's art ''has'' improved in recent years: compare the original [[Sonichu 0]] cover to his later covers. The amount in which he has improved, though, is up for debate.
 
===Choices of materials and technology===
[[File:July14MarkerPhoto.jpg|thumb|Chris's tools.]]
 
Chris believes that his so-called "hand-drawn style" is superior to art produced by any other means. This is due to Chris's hatred to change what he has already learned and his belief, as a consequence of his [[ego]], that his method is the best by virtue of being his.
 
Obviously, Chris's skill cannot compensate for the poor materials he uses. He does his work a disservice by using tools that are the cheapest available: copy paper, Pentel RSVP ballpoint pens, and Crayola washable markers.<ref>[[Mumble 7#10:21 Another fan asks about art supplies|Mumble #7]]</ref> These happen to be the tools he has used since childhood.
 
Far from archival quality, his art has sometimes shown [[Wedding Comic|signs of wrinkling]] as soon as it has been finished. Chris has defended his practice of [[Chris and writing#Dialogue|rampant textwalling]] as a way to "save marker ink."<ref>[[Mailbag 19]]</ref>
 
When Chris wants to alter a panel, but does not want to put in the effort to redraw the entire page, his method to fix it is to draw a piece on another page, cut it out, and glue it over the original drawing. This can be seen in revisions to [[Sonichu 15]].
 
While Chris has claimed at various times to use {{w|Adobe Photoshop}} to create his characters and edit his comics,<ref>[http://archive.sonichu.com/cwcipedia/index.php?title=Sonichu#Conception_and_Creation Sonichu's Conception and Creation], archived from [[CWCipedia]].</ref><ref>[[Miyamoto emails#Please Give Me $800]]</ref><ref>[[Chris's resume#Experience]]</ref> he has only ever been seen using {{w|Adobe PhotoDeluxe}},<ref>The Adobe PhotoDeluxe name can be seen on the taskbar of Chris's computer at 0:13 in [[Clyde's Buddy Matt Getting SUPER-LAID!!!]].</ref><ref>Chris offered PhotoDeluxe advice to [[The Wallflower]] in [[Wallflower E-mails 2]].</ref> with which he created his [[Clyde's Buddy Matt Getting SUPER-LAID!!!|slanderous head-swap]] of [[Clyde Cash|Clyde]]'s buddy Matt. This is in spite of the fact that PhotoDeluxe is intended for scanning and touching up photographs, and Photoshop (which Chris claims to own) would be better suited for the kind of general-purpose image editing and head-swapping that Chris does. In addition, PhotoDeluxe is a fossil of a program that hasn't been supported by Adobe since [[2002]]. Chris's claim in [[Mailbag 3]] that he uses "a past version" of Photoshop<ref>[[Mailbag 3#Art questions]]</ref> could imply that he is [[Slow-in-the-minds|confusing PhotoDeluxe for a part of the Photoshop line]], or that, if he really does use Photoshop, the revision he owns is just as woefully out-of-date as his ancient PhotoDeluxe program.
 
Chris's font of choice for most of the ''Sonichu'' comics was {{w|Comic Sans}}, a font almost universally condemned for being overused, childish, unprofessional, and ugly; serious designers generally only use it as a last resort or for ironic effect, since better handwritten fonts are available for purchase.<ref>[http://bancomicsans.com Ban the Comic Sans]</ref><ref>[http://achewood.com/index.php?date=07052007 They will make you taste the curb]</ref> However, starting from [[Sonichu 12-9|''Sonichu'' #12-9]] onward, he switched to Proxima Nova.
 
===Drawing techniques===
[[File:CChanDraws.jpg|thumb|Strange pen grips can be corrected with the assistance of school teachers. Chris slept through these lessons.]]
Chris has never even learned to hold a pen correctly. Instead of holding the front of the pen with the thumb and forefinger, he draws with his index finger sticking out and bent around the pen. Give this a try and see how long it takes for you to get carpal tunnel.
 
In [[CWC - Hand Drawn Original]] (2009), [[Live Drawing Streams]] (2017), and [[Over the shoulder colouring stream]] (2023), Chris demonstrated his drawing technique on video.
 
[[File:Chris pen grip 2019.jpg|Wearing gym gloves while drawing.|thumb]]
 
During 2019, Chris hampered his ability further by wearing his gym gloves while drawing.
 
{{quote|I don’t want to deal with the constant pencil sharpening and all that trash.|Chris giving one of his reasons for why he uses a pen for line art<ref>https://web.archive.org/web/20191108234140/https://twitter.com/cwcsonichu/status/1001562775209086976</ref>}}
 
While most artists will produce multiple sketch versions of a single drawing, often layered on top of one another, Chris is so confident in his innate artistic ability that his first step in a page of ''Sonichu'' is drawing the final line art in pen before coloring it in with Crayola markers. If he makes a mistake, he shrugs it off and continues. There is no post-processing beyond adding text to word balloons with MS Paint and PhotoDeluxe. Attempts to inform him that digital coloring is more efficient and far less expensive than wasting gallons of marker ink filling in monocolor backgrounds have failed.
[[File:ChrisChanColoringPenGrip2023.png||thumb]]
 
===Visual style and most artistic fundamentals===
[[Image:099-CWCsCWC.jpg|thumb|250px|left|Nice arms you got there, Chris.]]
[[File:SchuComic12-1P106.jpg|thumb|Try and work out what's meant to be happening here.]]
{{Quote|sonichu had kind of a kiddy art style, which i guess was your point. [...]<br> i thought you meant it as an avant-garde thing, to make a statment<br>like, ironically bad|[[Jackie]]<ref>[[Jackie Chat 2]]</ref>}}
 
Before the comics, Chris attempted realism for work in oil pastel, charcoal, and graphite, presumably for art classes in school. The results can be seen in the gallery below. While he did spend some time in high school taking art classes, most professional artists heavily study artistic fundamentals before venturing off into the territory of stylization. Without knowing how things appear in reality, it is difficult to distort properties to an aesthetically pleasing effect. Chris trusts in his abilities yet lacks proficiency in the most important fundamentals. This overconfidence results in the ''Sonichu'' comics looking like they were drawn by a grade-schooler.
 
Chris started out with a cartoony style for the comic book, full of techniques consistent with early efforts at drawing by small children. Things changed as Chris got into [[anime]] and manga, and sought to emulate them to impress his [[gal-pal]] at the time, [[Megan Schroeder]]. Like many amateur western artists, he copies only the surface elements of the anime style: big eyes, pentagonal heads, speed lines, emotions. These elements were simply laid over his original "style" with no adjustment, and did nothing to improve the quality of his work.
 
[[File:Michiru and Haruka translated art2.jpg|thumb|This woman has three elbows.]]
 
Chris has no understanding of classical anatomy, proportion in figure drawing, or even basic form. His characters are drawn using simple shapes – colored-in outlines, without any shading, ''ever'' – and even so, he is unable to keep the shapes consistent to any degree. These shapes rarely have any form at all, leading to characters having a "cardboard cutout" quality to them: head-on body with a slightly turned head. Though he lacks the skills to make even decent simple poses, Chris has the balls to attempt foreshortening on occasion- with disastrous results.
[[File:ChrisDislocatedWrists.png|thumb|right|In his hastiness to draw [[Giant Penis Comic|pornography]] of himself and [[Ivy]], Chris seems to have forgotten that wrists and forearms are incapable of twisting in such a way without causing serious and extremely painful dislocation injuries.]]
[[File:Billy mays hand.png|thumb|left|Something's not right with this picture...]]
 
Characters have no set proportions: limbs morph, heads change size, and faces become unrecognizable; it's only by the color scheme that we can guess which character is which. For example, in the opening of [[Sonichu 11|''Sonichu'' #11]], [[Sonichu and Rosechu's Children|the children]] tend to noticeably get deformed in a different manner in each panel, despite the fact that they're drawn as just an oval for the head, a rectangle for the body, and smaller ovals for the arms and legs. Just to be sure we know who's who (a job that is taken care of by the artwork in any normal comic) Chris sometimes relies on labelling characters with text and arrows. Beyond his [[Heterochromia|differently-colored eyes]] and [[Sonichu medallion]], no two Chrises have ever looked alike, or even remotely resembled the actual Chris. The character sizes are also inconsistent, which is strange considering most of the characters appear to be about the same size: in most drawings where Sonichu is carrying Rosechu, Rosechu seems to shrink.


[[Image:ProportionFail.jpg|thumb|Chris is an expert at proportion.]]
[[Image:ProportionFail.jpg|thumb|Chris is an expert at proportion.]]


'''Art''' has been, and always will be, [[Chris]]'s selling point. From the very day "[[Jason Kendrick Howell]]" found out about Chris and his creation of Sonichu to today, many people have been drawn (no pun intended) to Chris because of his infamous work (and stay because of what else he's done). To this day, many people wish to see more of it and will go to [[Ivy|extreme]] [[CChanSonichuCWC|measures]] to get him to work more.
Finer details of human anatomy have long escaped him; because Chris never draws women with pronounced hips, the results tend to resemble children or men (such as with the character [[Lovely Weather]]), with unfortunate implications in either case. Chris also doesn't seem to realize that drawing techniques that work in other media might not work in cartoons. For example, he sometimes draws himself with almond-shaped eyes. While no real person's eyelids are perfectly circular like a cartoon character, cartoonists generally reserve non-circular eyes for Asian characters. 
 
[[Image:Son-ChuVehicle.jpg|thumb|This car will either always veer left or never run at all.]]
 
Despite boasting that his "drawings of perspective viewpoints are surpassive [sic]"<ref>[[Miyamoto Saga]]</ref> due to his training in [[CADD]], Chris constantly fails at perspective, with objects implied to be far-away depicted too large. This is evident in his many [[Son-Chu|vehicle designs]], where the front is usually a direct frontal (90 degree) view, regardless of the view angle of other sides. This inability to demonstrate parallel lines renders the car distorted. The lack of any concept of shading only further destroys any semblance of perspective; legs that are implied to be bent forward at the knee only end up looking shorter.
 
Possibly the worst offender is Chris's constant omission of backgrounds. Most scenes happen only on the white backdrop of the paper. Readers are apparently supposed to infer what the background looks like based on context, similar to some daily newspaper comic strips. Thus, simply drawing a wide-angle shot of the scenery as the first (usually transitional) panel in a scene would suffice. Combined with his inability to make a proper layout, many action scenes end up becoming a jumble of characters moving around without regards to sequence. The reason he does this is probably the same as the reason why he textwalls so often: to "save marker ink," meaning he's lazy. (Incidentally, the proper use of white space and the conservation of painted space is a key element in East Asian art, but despite his anime obsession he is unlikely to have heard of this).
 
A related phenomenon is simply drawing characters as floating disembodied heads. The [[Magi-chan|deus ex machina/exposition machine]] is the biggest victim of this. Once again, Chris couldn't bother to draw a full body. Thus, combining all known forms of "marker ink conservation", some pages are just a bunch of literal talking heads speaking walls of text.
 
Chris owns at least one book about drawing manga, as seen in [[My Half of A Whole New World for Kacey]]. The book in itself covers everything to do with portraying couples, including images of couples in bed making love. Whether Chris bought it to better draw out his delusional fantasies or for more material to [[mass debate]] to isn't known, but either way, the book taught him nothing.
 
=== Character design ===
See also: [[Chris and writing#Characterization|Written characterization]]
 
A large portion of the ''Sonichu'' cast is clearly derivative of existing characters. In addition to the obvious ''Sonic the Hedgehog'' recolors, Chris has lifted designs from any anime, video game, or even Western animation he is fond of, with no regard for visual consistency.
 
Beyond that, he doesn't even bother trying to design better clothing for his characters. Most of them wear stereotypical "basic" clothing, and Chris himself wears his usual [[clown shirt]]s and pants. With the sole exception of [[Megan Schroeder|Meg-chan]], every female that shows up in his comics wears high-heeled dress shoes.
 
Even when the source of Chris's plagiarism is readily apparent, these lifts can still add up to less than the sum of their parts. Inspired by the fusion characters of ''[[Dragon Ball Z]]'' and ''[[God of War]]'', [[Collosal Chan]] looks more like a hobo than a fusion of Chris and Chris-Chan Sonichu. Though clearly, his own effort to design baby [[Pokémon]], [[Sonee and Rosey]] look more unnerving than adorable.
 
===Fan (dis)service===
[[File:SchuComic9Page32-E.jpg|right|thumb|150px|Insta-boner.]]
{{quote|I am not a gorey artist; just accept the Fan Service of panty-shots and get over yourselves.|<ref>[[Mailbag 45#Chris' hormones + Rosechu's ass = Fan service]]</ref>}}
{{w|Fan service}} is a term used to describe something that is meant to tease or please the audience. It can refer to any content seen as an effort to appease the desires of fans, but for the sake of this section, it's used primarily to describe scenes of a sexually titillating nature.  
 
Since his discovery by the Internet, Chris has inserted increasingly large amounts of fan service into the initially tame ''Sonichu'' in an effort to assert the heterosexuality of himself and his characters. The range of fan service in ''Sonichu'' includes panty shots, Rosechu's [[women's rights|stripping]], cameltoe indentations, and even a full [[Sonichu 8#Episode 17|sex scene]] followed by four pages of text and diagrams describing Sonichu and Rosechu's sexual anatomy.
 
[[File:Battery-Charge Heart intro.jpg|thumb|left|150px|He made sure to draw [[Battery-Charge Heart]]'s skirt so short, we can see the carpet matches the drapes.]]
Due to his lack of artistic faculties, much of Chris's depictions of sexuality are highly unsettling to most readers. Any attempts to add "sexy" material come across as Chris's own wish-fulfillment or self-interest, rather than attempts by Chris to please his audience.
 
While the point of fan service is to hint at sexuality in an otherwise clean work meant for general audiences, ''Sonichu'''s sexual content hides nothing and disturbs many, despite the fact that Chris has always viewed ''Sonichu'' as a comic intended for children. Chris tried to justify putting panty shots in a children's comic by saying... {{quote|Children will likely be seeing the same things in real life, so mellow out and let them learn a bit, and further educate the children with discussions.|Children will be seeing furry porn in real life.<ref>[[Mailbag_47#Children_will_be_seeing_furry_porn_in_real_life]]</ref>}}


When faced with Chris, most people will undoubtedly ask, "is there any field of endeavour that he doesn't completely suck? Is there any field where he has shown any improvement at all?" One could argue that he ''has'', in fact, got slightly better over the years. There's no question about it; the early ''Sonichu'' comics are noticeably worse than the newer ones. However, we must remember that he wasn't any good to begin with and has barely gotten any better in spite of years of practice. Chris's drawings still remain disproportionate, child-like, unimaginative and ''hilarious''. [[GodJesus]] bless his little autistic heart.
==Strong points==
Chris is far from the worst artist ever; there are several strong points to his work that set him apart from other poor artists.
===Color choices and coordination===
Chris does get color coordination. Most of the color schemes he uses in his work look decent. Being Chris, he still fails occasionally, such as with the [[CWCipedia]] color scheme. Still, color is one of his few strong points, at least compared to the rest of his art style. As evidenced by most of his websites, custom console skins, and a good chunk of his character designs, Chris's favorite colors appear to be yellow and blue. That color combination is hard to get wrong, which is why so many cartoon characters (from the Simpsons to SpongeBob) have yellow skin. Chris also appears to be fond of the [[United States of America|red, white, and blue]] compliment, judging by his [[The Classic|trademark polo shirt]].  


==Chris and the medium==
Despite excelling in this fundamental field, Chris does struggle with coloring [[rainbow]]s in the correct order of ROYGBIV.
tl;dr: Chris is an anti-artist.


=== Exercise of skills and improvement in craft ===
===Dexterity===
Since Chris first started drawing, his artwork has been abysmal. While it may have improved since the day he first drew Sonic the Hedgehog, there's still considerable room for improvement. Sad to say, Chris refuses to improve, thinking that what he's doing now is the shit.
Despite his awkward pen grip, Chris seems to have a mostly steady hand. His penmanship is neat and legible, and most of his mistakes stem from writing the wrong letter and scribbling/doctoring it into the right one, instead of any kind of actual handwriting disorder. His most recent driver's license signature appears to be quite flourished and feminine. Many artists with unorthodox hand techniques claim their grips can actually give them more control over the pen, and even trained calligraphers don't always stick to the standard grip that most are taught in kindergarten.  


As Chuck Jones said, everyone's got a hundred thousand bad drawings in them. Chris is just too lazy to get them out. Chris fails to understand that even great artists don't get every stroke down on the paper perfectly; he just scribbles down something and thinks that is the best thing he can ever do. Many beginning artists notice immediately that they can't draw worth a damn, and spend quite a lot of time erasing and redrawing. This is perfectly normal. Where Chris fails is not stopping and asking "does this look good?" If the answer is "no," the obvious solution is to keep trying. In Chris's mind, the answer is always "yes."
Chris never seemed to struggle in the dexterity department – he can write and draw more neatly than folks with poor {{w|fine motor skills}}. He doesn't have an issue with other activities requiring dexterity, such as typing or playing [[video games]]. The [[autism papers]] don't even mention poor fine motor coordination, which is relatively common (but not universal)  among autistics. Even [[autism|our own article on Chris's diagnosis]] doesn't touch his dexterity, only his {{w|gross motor skills}}. '''For once, Chris's autism isn't the culprit!'''


Chris does not appear to draw much outside of the comic pages themselves. He almost never shows any pencil sketches (and those only when trolls whip him into releasing them), and never any practice drawings, master copies, anatomy studies, speed sketches, class exercises, scribbles on napkins from restaurants, or anything of that sort; it is easy to question whether or not he does any of the latter sorts at all. When he tried to prove his real identity, he just showed drawings that everyone had seen before, some of which were several ''years'' old. Most amateur or professional artists, if put into that situation, would probably flip open their sketchbook and show new stuff they'd just drawn an hour ago. He appears to do at least some pencil sketches before drawing the comic (the hasty release of [[Sonichu 9]] also proves that), but judging from his [[CWC - Hand Drawn Original|tutorial video]], he doesn't ink the pencilings, he just re-draws everything hastily.
If Chris actually took his time and learned patience, his line work could be phenomenal.


He revealed in [http://cogsdev.110mb.com/cwcipedia/index.php/Mailbag_2 a response to an email dated 21 November 2009] that he spends "an hour at most" drawing a comic page and about a half-hour coloring it, "sometimes longer depending on the thought process" (whatever that means). In other words, he invests only a ''fraction'' of the time most serious artists put into their work, and it shows.
===Reach===
''See also: [[Warhol / Chris Chan]]''


Ultimately, Chris will never improve because he doesn't actually ''care'' about his art or his comics. He's not interested in creating art for art's sake, and he doesn't care about the story. Like with his [[Sonichu Chronicles|videogame ideas]], he considers any idea he comes up with just as valid as anything he actually commits to paper. He only started publicizing his work as a horribly misguided attempt to attract [[boyfriend-free girl|women]], and he only continues to work on it because he's convinced he has a large fanbase that's demanding it. And he only cares about ''that'' because he thinks that some of his fans are women who might [[china|reward him]] for his skills.
Chris has undoubtedly become a pop culture phenomenon, while many other artists who spent decades refining their craft can go their entire lives without selling many paintings – or any at all. ''Looking at [[medallions]] alone,'' Chris has sold more works than Frida Kahlo even ''produced'' in her lifetime. Chris's works have been referenced in master theses, published essays, and other academic media countless times. Judging by artists like Van Gogh or Warhol, GodBear knows if Chris's works will end up in a museum some time after his [[Chris and death|passing]]. The fact that people are compelled to look at Chris's work at all speaks volumes.


=== Comic writing and structure ===
===Is art even ''Sonichu's'' main failing?===
{{main|Chris and writing}}
{{main|Chris and writing}}


Chris has major problems keeping the story together: the comic is not scripted at all, and he keeps adding details that he doesn't properly explain later in the story. As far as comic structure goes, he also as problems with textwalling and keeping the speech bubbles in comprehensible order.
Complex drawing is not mandatory for making a good comic. Chris's art style is arguably more complex than the style Charles Schulz used for ''Peanuts''. ''{{w|Diary of a Wimpy Kid}}'' and ''{{w|xkcd}}'' get the job done with simple stick figures. Some artistically challenged cartoonists will even ditch the pen for a nice camera to create a {{w|photo comic}}. These genres might not carry museum-quality art, but the cartoonists generally make up for it with clever writing.
 
However, ''Sonichu'' doesn't even have that to fall back on. Chris does no preparatory writing or preliminary revision; his narrative is wholly improvised and shifts regularly. He cannot write clear, succinct dialogue, and he has little regard for visual clarity.
 
He doesn't understand how graphic novels are supposed to work as a narrative through sequential images, and instead presents the series more like a storyboard for a hypothetical television series. As a whole, the series has excessive dialogue, something better suited for a novel or television script. It often uses literal phrases (e.g., "cuts grass") as a substitute for visual action and/or comic onomatopoeia. Chris divides each volume of ''Sonichu'' into "episodes", a concept popular in TV land, but unheard of in the comic book industry. Perhaps Chris isn't interested in art or comics – he's just interested in ''Sonichu''.
 
==Other peculiarities==
==="Me" arrow===
[[File:Me arrow.jpeg|thumb|left|An example of the "me" arrow]]
In some artwork from the latter 2010s, Chris put a small "Me" sign, often with an arrow, next to the character (or characters) meant to represent him. It is unclear why Chris does this, although the usage correlates with him exploring the concept of alternate realities as a [[coping]] mechanism.
{{clear}}
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File:NightStarBorb.png
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File:Chris Chan Sonichu in TF2 Analysis.jpg
</gallery></center>
 
==Chris and digital art==
[[File:Sonichuipaddrawing2020.jpg|thumb|200px|[[CWC-isms#hand-drawing|A blocky and low-resolution]][[Spirit possession| self portrait]]: Chris's foray into iPad art.]]
 
Much like his opinions on [[Chris and drugs#Alcohol|alcohol]], [[SLGBTQ|LGBT+ folks]], [[List of things Chris has shoved up his ass|butt play]], and the holy [[HEXBox]], Chris's thoughts on digital art have evolved from outright bashing to a much more open outlook.
 
===During the classic era===
In the early 2000s, Chris was somewhat open to the digital arts. He created [[Sonichu (character)|Sonichu]] in a high school computer graphics class, and he would brag and boast about his [[CADD]] major. Things changed soon after. 
 
Chris would often state that using new technology creatively provides an unfair advantage in the service of inferior results. Repeatedly, he has called ''[[Asperchu]]'' "blocky and low resolution" because it was drawn with a tablet, this is most likely because Chris thinks that doing digital art instead of the traditional way makes results comparable to poor MS Paint drawings that are more familiar with him. In one of his [[Alec Benson Leary Phone Call 1|phone calls to Alec Benson Leary]], Chris said his hand-drawn art had "more character" (never mind that tablet art is technically hand-drawn art anyway).
 
===A change of heart: Chris gets an iPad===
Chris began opening up to digital media in the 2010s. In [[May 2020]], during his phase of [[role-play]]ing as [[Sonichu]], Chris used his [[COVID-19]] Economic Impact Payment check on an iPad, software, and accessories for drawing digital art. He attempted a drawing of Sonichu, and he complained about how hard the software was to use.<ref>[[May 2020 social media posts#Chris gets an iPad]]</ref>
 
===Will Chris switch to digital?===
On 14 [[July 2021]], Chris tagged the Crayola company in a Twitter thread, complaining about inconsistencies between similar- and same-colored markers.<ref>https://twitter.com/CPU_CWCSonichu/status/1415466170271010818</ref>
 
A Twitter user asked Chris if he would switch to digital art, stating "it might be better for you in the long run". Instead of defending his marker-on-paper style like usual, he responded favorably:
 
{{quote|Eventually, likely so. I have been so very busy to totally find my niche with a tablet and stylus pen setup. Sonichu gave my body a conscious start on the setup with the iPad, but that’s a major Gonna need more free time to practice with it. I haven’t found the right timing yet|Chris <ref>https://twitter.com/CPU_CWCSonichu/status/1415762053755723777</ref>}}
 
Notably, Chris admitted that digital art takes effort, and he seems willing to make the switch in the future after some practice. Time will tell if he does so, now that he has been freed from jail.
 
==Chris's other artistic media==
 
Drawing may be Chris's medium of choice, but he's dabbled in others.
 
===3D Media===
[[File:Med_59_A.png|thumb|150px|One of the replica medals]]
Chris has produced a line of Sonichu [[medallions]], made out of [[CHRIS!!! CHANDLER!!!|Crayola fuckin' Model Magic and acrylic paint]]. In [[September 2014]], Chris started selling replicas of his handcrafted medals, produced to various qualities.
 
He has made [[Sonichu Amiibo]] by Frankensteining multiple Amiibos together and crudely painting them.
 
Another 3D piece is his [[Sonic Totem]] from middle school, which sold on [[eBay]] for $1500 USD.


=== Choices of materials and technology ===
===3D printing===
While it's true that buying fancy pens won't make you a great artist, they certainly help. Chris doesn't believe in decent-quality media. Cheap paper, cheap pens, Crayola Fucking Magic Markers — serious artists would invest a little bit more of thought on these issues as well. Good art pencils do not cost that much more than crappy ones, and are available at wide range of blackness. Lowest-grade paper has the tendency to crinkle ([[Wedding Comic|even before you stick it in scanner]]) and turn yellow really fast, while even the typical photocopy/laser printer paper avoids that fate.
{{main|3D printing}}


As seen in CWC - Hand Drawn Original, his sketching set is something no adult would be caught using professionally, and he doesn't even the most basic of drawing desks or surfaces. His creations come to life via a toy-like sketching kit from [[Wikipedia:Spin Master|Spin Master]] called [http://www.amazon.com/Strawberry-Shortcake-Reflecta-Sketch-Set/dp/B00144QMOY Reflecta Sketch] (shockingly, not the Strawberry Shortcake kit seen in the link; it's assumed the product bombed and he was one of the few who bought it, thus the lack of a product page from Spin Master), which only allows him to trace on basic letter-sized copy paper, not the large sketching paper most professional artists use. The kit comes with a reflective piece of plastic where an original can be placed to the left and the reflection is used for tracing an outline, allowing Chris the ease of copying other artists' works to use in his general and [[Rule 34]] artwork.
Chris has long held an interest in using 3D-printing technology, although the most he has done with it is plagiarize files for printing, then hand-paint them.


Of course, considering where Chris prioritizes what he gets from his [[monthly tugboat]] (i.e., [[sex toys]], [[My Little Pony]]s and [[video games|vidya games]]), it's no wonder that a man who buys all his [[Chris and fashion|clothing]] from a Salvation Army that's apparently run by clowns would never invest in art supplies that weren't intended for a third-grader.
===Photography and Videography===
{{Main|Chris and cinematography}}


The less we say about Chris's use of computers in putting the final touches in his comics, the better. ''He uses Comic Sans, for crying out loud'', the worst [http://bancomicsans.com/ typographical blasphemy possible] for professional artists, horrendously angry artists who will [http://achewood.com/index.php?date=07052007 make you taste the curb]. Just download something from [http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=102 here], man. Chris appears to have some version of Photoshop at his disposal (as seen in the "Spiderman-fucking Clyde" saga), but as everyone can tell from the results, either he doesn't know how to use it, or he uses Photoshop in a way that no one can tell it from the results. (Obviously, the latter is how Photoshop ''should'' be used, but hell, the people who came up with that truism probably didn't have Sonichu comic in mind.)
Video media has been some of Chris's most frequently produced content. The lacking production quality is frequently compensated for by Chris's emotional theatrics.


=== Drawing techniques ===
===Animation===
Chris has never even learned to hold a pen correctly. Instead of holding the front of the pen with the thumb and forefinger, he draws with his index finger sticking out and bent around the pen.
Chris at one point tried taking up a new medium in the form of animation. Using the Nintendo DSi program ''[[Flipnote Hatena|Flipnote Studio]]'', Chris took his drawing to a whole new level...or least, he could have. His drawing degraded greatly when doing artwork here, mostly due to using the DS's stylus pen. When doing animations, his characters have very little fluid movement to them and they seem to [[jerk]] and wobble, as if they're characters from ''[[CWCFlyingElephants|Ed, Edd n Eddy]]'' or ''[[Adult Swim|Home Movies]]''. The best one to tell of this is the [[Don'tGetTrolled!]] animation; you can tell which part was animated by Chris and which part was animated by the original author, 8-Bit, because Chris's artwork just wobbles in a distorted fashion.


Even worse, he doesn't have a working drawing process. Well prepared is half done, and most artists spend most of the time in the preparation phase: sketches, sketches, sketches. On the other hand, Chris seems to focus on what is admittedly the most taxing part of drawing: coloring and putting in the final little details. As said above, Chris hastily sketches something or draws outlines, then colors the drawing. The whole ''point'' of pencil sketches is that you know beforehand where the ink goes; the idea is to make sure your drawing looks ''right'' before you make hard-to-repair mistakes. The whole process of refining the work and whittling out imperfections one by one until you're satisfied with the result is probably something that would cause too much [[stress]]. Also, Chris is incapable of drawing simple straight lines or even coloring within his lines 100% of the time.
===Music===
{{Main|Chris and music}}


=== Visual style and anatomy ===
Chris is a passionate musician who has self-released three albums, all of which feature him tone-deafly singing derivatives songs on top of famous music.
Before the comics, Chris at least attempted a style approaching realism for "paintings" (actually, on close examination, most are crayon drawings filled in to a ridiculously thorough degree). Most of the results are buried deep in the [[Scrapbook of Fail]] and are about as good as you'd imagine: the anatomy is questionable at best, and rarely consistent. Notably, his glasses are drawn as gi-normous goggles, and appear to be the same frames he wears today. Around the time he got into Pokémon, he started moving from pseudo-realistic into a style the Internet would be much more familiar with.


Chris started out with a cartoony style for the comic book, in that all the characters had round heads and comparatively small eyes. One trait that has persisted over years is the way he draws smiles (and oh boy, do his characters smile a lot): A smiling mouth is a curved line with two tiny curved lines in the ends. Most children draw smiles this way, but there always will be a day when the kindergarten or 1st-grade school teacher says that this is just ''not'' how people draw smiles in the real world. Nowadays, though, Chris is more eager to draw only half of the smiles, which looks a little bit less creepily manchild-like.
===Sewing===
[[File:Cwc_sewing3.jpeg|thumb|150px|Chris the seamstress.]]


Things changed as Chris got into [[anime]], as well as manga, and sought to emulate them to impress his then-current [[gal-pal]], [[Megan Schroeder]]. As like many amateur western artists who ape the style without attempting to adapt it, he simply uses the cliches of "anime style": big eyes, speed lines, panty shots and many of the cheesier conventions, along with heads shaped like pentagons. There is no attempt to incorporate, fuse or otherwise adopt manga elements in a creative and original manner; these art elements are simply layered on top of his original "style" with no adjustment. Chris is no Go Nagai, nor has he probably even heard of him.  
Chris "restored" [[The Classic|his classic striped shirt]] himself before attempting to sell it. As said shirt spent three years in a water-filled trash bag and was damaged beyond repairability, it didn't work out that well.


Tying in with this, Chris shows no interest in proportion or even basic anatomy. The manga style allows for some artistic license when drawing human beings, but after seeing what Chris does with anatomy, or rather doesn't, it's clear to see his license needs to be revoked. He draws characters as colored-in outlines, and as a result they have no appreciable anatomy or proportion. All his characters are made of lumpy, sexless shapes with crude genitalia attached. For someone who's supposedly a porno connoisseur, Chris doesn't seem to notice there are sexual characteristics that make women attractive beyond boobs, china, and ass; if he does, he's doing a predictably terrible job depicting them. Note the porn Chris rips off, and how he mimics the basic shape of each picture while getting the anatomy (wonky as most of them are) disturbingly out of whack.
===Spray-painting===
{{Main|Shoe Colouring}}


When Sonichu is drawn by Chris speeding towards a rescue, he doesn't look like he's rushing to save the day Sonic-style, but instead has the proportions of those over-exaggerated steamroller men that are the hallmark of circa 1960's Yellow Page ads for construction companies. It's easy to see that Chris is copying the original style of Sonic's running based off the old DiC-produced cartoons and the early comics (which Sonic was depicted running in a cartoon-like, spinning-wheel manner), his lack of proportion and lazy manner in which he refuses to show bending legs give the illusion of Sonichu becoming a steamroller.
On 3 August 2018, Chris tackled shoe customization and spent an hour spray-painting a pair of Adidas in Sonichu colors.


What's worse is that even though his characters are simple shapes, they aren't even consistent simple shapes. From one drawing to the next, Chris draws his characters (even himself) differently. Limbs change shape, heads change size, and faces become unrecognizable; it's only by color scheme that we can guess which character is which. If he were even to practice in the ''slightest'' degree, anatomy and character design would be more consistent. Beyond his differently-colored eyes and Sonichu medallion, no two Chrises have ever looked alike, or even remotely like the actual Chris, although [[Sammy]] comes somewhat closer.
===Costume Design===
{{Main|Chris and cosplaying}}
Continuing his trend of using the cheapest materials possible while incorporating only the vaguest of likenesses, Chris's foray in cosplay is par for the course with his hand-drawings. They're poorly made, not thought out, and Chris likely believes they're professional quality.


An interesting thing to note is that, if a character is part of the background (and sometimes, even if they aren't), Chris will draw that character either one of two ways: as a simple white silhouette or as a stick figure. The silhouette drawing was a nuance that Chris picked up after watching the anime series ''[[Excel Saga]]'', while the stick figure idea was picked up through ''[[South Park]]''. Interestingly, Rob Liefeld has also used this shorthand, and, as his many "admirers" will point out, it's one of the laziest shortcuts ever, not to mention blatantly obvious in a medium that ''isn't animated.''
==Originality and plagiarism==
{{Main|Things Chris has ripped off}}
{{see also|Chris and copyright|Parody}}


Chris's use of color is rather staggering, and it's hard to begin describing it. Because he colors everything with markers, he uses a lot of flat, basic colours, often as bright as possible. He often doesn't even try finding natural shades of things, or sometimes even shades that would fit in the drawings at all. This is the prime reason why his drawings look so childish.
When it comes to originality, Chris has absolutely none.  


=== Character Design ===
''Sonichu'' is a fine blend of Chris's personal life and a wide variety of recognizable copyrighted elements. Just about any existing medium that Chris has ever expressed a fondness for appears in some capacity.  
As stated throughout this article, despite Chris's colorful cast of characters, many of them ripoff designs from existing characters, with Chris making no effort whatsoever to disguise them. His [[Sonichu (species)|Sonichus]] tend to follow the same Sonic-type anthropomorphic look: slick backed quills, shoes and gloves. [[Rosechu (species)|Rosechus]], however, vary. Rosechu herself follows Amy Rose's look; [[Bubbles]], [[Simonla]] and [[Angelica]] follow the SatAM Sonic series and Archie comic series' [[Women's Rights|a lack of clothing]] (e.g., Sally Acorn); and [[Zapina]] is the only one with an original look.


This design failure goes beyond his Electric Hedgehog Pokémon and extends to his humans as well, especially those connected to him. Most of the time, he'll either disguise their faces with a hood or lift designs from characters from other series. [[Bagget]] and [[ScotPalazzo]] were pulled from characters from ''Excel Saga''. Whenever Chris needed designs for his e-sweethearts' families, he really went off the deep end: [[Officer Keino]], Ivy's father, had his design cribbed off Coach McGuick of ''Home Movies'' and the father and sister of Kacey were ripped off from Guile from ''Street Fighter'' and Candice from ''Pokémon''.
Chris has a long history of claiming all credit for fan characters initially acknowledged as being created by others and offered for use in Chris's comics. The first of these were [[Megagi]], [[Jiggliami]], and [[Layla]], but the most infamous instance, and the one that Chris defended the most fervently, was [[Simonla Rosechu]].  


Beyond that, he doesn't even bother trying to design better clothing for his characters. Most of them wear stereotypical "basic" clothing and Chris himself wears his usual clown shirts and pants. With the sole exception of [[Meg-chan]], every female that shows up in his comics wears high-heeled dress shoes, probably inspired by the fact that most elder animated female characters tend to wear those types of shoes where ever they go.
At the same time, Chris once had a policy of threatening nonexistent legal action against the creators of any ''Sonichu'' fan art he could find, and was worked into a [[12 January 2010|magnificent rage]] over the ''Sonichu''-derivative fan [[parody]] ''Asperchu''.  


== Chris and the industry ==
As well, Chris has gone so far as to take a video, the aforementioned [[Don'tGetTrolled!]], and alter it to suit his needs. Now, granted, there were other videos done using that same video, but where they just altered the stick character or sped up the video in the same vein as a [[Random-access humor|YouTube Poop]], Chris completely and utterly altered the video to suit his needs so that a humorous song about [[trolling]] is turned into Chris's mouthpiece to destroy Freedom of Speech to make the Internet safer for him.
In the [[Sonichu Chronicles]] and [[Chris's resume]], it's revealed that Chris is under the impression that his art isn't just good, but professional quality, and that he aspires to get into the comics and video game business. The résumé reveals his desire to work as an artist for a professional comic company such as Archie Comics or Marvel, creating his Sonichu comics. There is no word on whether or not he actually submitted anything to these companies, or if they replied.


It has been demonstrated again and again that Chris has little concept of how the creative industries work, which is quite strange; one would assume that a person seeking a career in the industries would at least take ''some'' effort to find out how the said industries work. The publishing industry does not want or seek résumés; they make publishing contracts on completed manuscripts and works that have been submitted to them. Comic publishers don't employ artists unless they have a portfolio of work, and top-notch publishers probably want actual previous publication credits before they let the artists mess with their priceless properties on their dime. Chris hasn't even tried any self-publishing channels, and the thought of monetizing his web comic hasn't crossed his mind either. It also took a while for Chris to come up with the idea of drawing on-camera.
==Art gallery==
===School art===
Seen below is a selection of Chris's public school art assignments, from a slideshow on Chris's homemade [[DVD]]. At his high school graduation, Chris expected to be "Highly Recognized" for his "ARTISTIC TALENT", represented in this body of work. When he was not, he cried.<ref>[[Manchester High School#Graduation]]</ref> This work was produced under the supervision of a professional art instructor and the incentive for Chris to give each piece more thought, care and attention than he now prefers to when creating only for his own satisfaction. Despite this, they're still terrible. Note that some readers may find several of these images inadvertently terrifying.  


In the Sonichu Chronicles he gives [[Shigeru Miyamoto]] "permission" to use the cover to his [[hand-drawn Nintendo Power magazine|hand-drawn ''Nintendo Power'' magazine]] as the inevitable cover for when his game is created, even though it's several years old (and, in fact, even ''worse'' than Chris' current skill at art).
{{collapsible
|Gallery
|<gallery>
Image:441-CubScoutShield.JPG|Defending the honor of [[Chris and health|junk food everywhere!]]
Image:442-HedgehogShark1.JPG|Sculpted in such a way that it looks like a [[DIRTY, CRAPPED BRIEFS|toilet]] at first blush.
Image:443-HedgehogShark2.JPG|
Image:444-MecheFox.JPG|Fox McCloud, one month after crash-landing in the middle of Africa.
Image:445-SonicTotem.JPG|This thing deserves [[Sonic Totem|its own page]] by now.
Image:446-CWCWeave.JPG|The teacher quickly thought up something to keep Chris occupied for the rest of the lesson.
Image:447-CWCSonicPlate.JPG|Coming soon from Franklin Mint...
Image:448-CWCWigwam.JPG|Ancient relic of the [[Cherokian Clan]].
Image:449-CWCDreamCatcher.JPG|It doesn't catch dreams. It ''stares into your soul''.
Image:450-HedgehogFish1.JPG|Sad to say, it was originally Chris who came up with the "Long fish is loooooo
Image:451-HedgehogFish2.JPG|oooooooooooong" meme.
Image:452-CWCsBunchOfArt.jpg|Scan of a print of a photograph of drawings. How very meta!
Image:454-CWCsPossibleFuture.JPG|[[Autism]] is in Living Room. Autism is in Wife. Autism is in Children and - well - Autism is in Life.
Image:455-EspanolicAndVegaton.JPG|A rare shot of Chris's largely forgotten Pokémons, Espanolic and Vegaton.
Image:459-CWCsBanjo.JPG|Banjo, the champion of Christianity and bright colors.
Image:460-CWCsComputerGraphicsPoster.JPG|In the first lesson, the computer graphics teachers usually say something like "Don't go crazy with the effects, m'kay?" Chris never listens.
Image:463-SonicAndTailsBunch.jpg|A Magic Eye picture that reveals absolutely nothing. We tried.
Image:464-CWCSpeckle.jpg|The teacher who traumatized Chris wasn't actually the principal - it was the art teacher, who forced Chris to make a drawing with prickly-wicklies.
Image:465-CWCsStarCoilPot.JPG|Chris's masterpiece of originality, second only to the creation of Sonichu<ref>[[IRC (18 December 2008)]]</ref>: an ash tray that shoots tobacco straight to the Sun - powered by dark magic.
Image:466-CWCNecklace.jpg|Some [[Cherokian Clan|Ancient Cherokian]] [[Sex toys|anal beads]].
Image:467-CWCPlate.JPG|It's... off-center.
Image:468-SonicCup.JPG|Sonic [[Yawning Squirtle|unfocuses]].
Image:469-SonicCupSide.JPG
Image:470-CWCCoilPot.JPG|Chris's shield was eaten.
Image:471-ChristophersLeatherFace.JPG|Following in Ed Gein's footsteps.
Image:472-CWCWingCapDish.JPG|We don't know ''what'' this is, but it has the letter C, so it's obviously Chris's.
Image:473-YarnPot.JPG
Image:474-SquarePot.JPG
Image:475-RelaxingCWC1.JPG|A relaxing person who bears little resemblance to Chris.
Image:476-RelaxingCWC2.JPG|The same. Hilariously enough, [http://www.miketyndall.com/todd_goldman/ Todd Goldman] ripped off the "[[White knight#Chris will reject your advice|I just don't listen]]" things on the background. Everything is interconnected! [[Soul Calibur|Tracing and ignorance, fiercely entangled!]]
Image:477-PastelDuoPic.JPG
Image:478-PastelHorses.JPG|[[My Little Pony|Proto-Cheroki-Chan.]]
Image:479-PastelSunset.JPG|[[DIRTY, CRAPPED BRIEFS|A big golden turd.]]
Image:482-SwirlingEspanolics.JPG
Image:483-RainbowLeaf.JPG|OH, GOD! What does this ''mean''?
Image:484-MergingPeople.JPG|Art class pictures usually have some sort of central idea the teacher gave to the students. Chris is [[Autism|unable to communicate it to us.]]
Image:485-CWCsF.JPG|It's a passable drawing, so it's possible Chris didn't fail the class. But if it is a drawing of failure, did he also create his first time paradox here?
Image:486-CWCcatchesaPikachu.JPG|Chris approaches a wild Pikachu, aiming to bash its brains out with a rare pygmy Electrode.
Image:487-CWCMergedinArt.jpg|A clever idea. Probably his teacher's, though.
Image:488-100_0521.JPG|Something that looks like the shopping mall, but actually isn't.
Image:489-100_0522.JPG|"I wish I were in [[Inos|Jamacia]]" (sic). Deep-rooted wishes, I see.
Image:490-100_0523.JPG|Colorful arboreal antics.
Image:491-100 0524.JPG|Possibly "L" and "O". Could be a corruption of LOL.
Image:492-100 0525.JPG|Raichu, the Turbo Megazord, Sonic, Game Boy and Nintendo 64 controller.
Image:493-100 0526.JPG|See, he ''can'' draw a proportional drinking straw. [[The Oversized Drinking Straw of Fail]] was ''deliberate''.
Image:494-100 0527.JPG|Indistinct shapes, possibly [[Crass and Champ|crabs]].
Image:495-100 0528.JPG|A collage of weird local imagery.
Image:496-100 0529.JPG|Daffodils, which, in Greek mythology, first came forth as a result of [[Chris and his Ego|narcissism]]. Also: Skeleton.
Image:497-100 0530.JPG|[[Christian's name change|The Bear]] keeps on truckin'.
Image:498-100 0531.JPG|[[fapcup|Jars]]. A proudly standing bottle and a tomato, casting nice round shadows.
Image:499-100 0532.JPG|Mysterious floating keyring.
Image:500-100 0533.JPG|Not sure what ''this'' is, but it looks a bit phallic.
Image:501-100 0534.JPG|Chris's Ash Ketchum get-up.
Image:503-100 0537.JPG|Pikachu, Mew, what looks like Chris's personal Pokégear stuff, and an ad for [[CWC's Pokésite 2]].
Image:504-100 0538.JPG|[[April 16 Fetish Vids|Shower]]???
Image:505-100 0539.JPG|A drawer full of what appears to be [[CWCFlyingElephants|socks]] and [[DIRTY, CRAPPED BRIEFS]].
Image:506-100 0540.JPG|[[R.L. Stine]] books and Pokémon.
</gallery>}}


==Originality==
===Tracing===
He has none. Let's leave it at that.
'''Tracing''' is an art technique where another piece of art, in whole or part, is copied along with its outlines. As a means of producing original art claimed as one's own, tracing is a form of plagiarism.  


==Plagiarism and stealing==
Images traced from existing copyrighted content appear regularly in ''Sonichu''. Chris traces with the Reflecta Sketch, a long-discontinued toy tracing kit produced by Spin Master. The kit comes with a reflective piece of plastic where an original can be placed to the left and the reflection is used for tracing an outline. This is why most traced images in ''Sonichu'' are mirror images of the original work. Due to their poor quality, consistent in appearance with ''Sonichu'' art that is not traced, these traced images often go unnoticed as tracing. The fact that Chris fails even at tracing is a surprise to no one.
: ''See also: [[Chris and copyright]]''


From the day Chris drew his Homemade ''Nintendo Power'' magazine, it's easy to see that Chris copies what he sees. This easily started with his drawings of Sonic, Mega Man X and the like on there, but it really spiraled out of control with the creation of Sonichu and Rosechu. It's easy to see that, whenever Chris needs an awesome pose or something for a character, he'll usually fall back on what he's seen. This usually means that he'll take a piece of artwork and change it to his own needs. For example, Rosechu's nudes in [[Sonichu 8|Episode 17]] are actually tracings of Sonic, Transformers and ''[[Family Guy]]'' porn, as seen below.
Alternatively, Chris uses these images as references and simply tries to draw images free-hand based on them. This is no worse than directly tracing the outlines, but better explains why his results are so distorted in respect to their references. Chris probably uses a combination of both techniques (as some images look closer to their originals than others), showing an utter lack of skill and originality either way.


Even more so, Chris isn't above stealing and even altering others' work just to make it his own. Sonichu's easily a given, but it's really evident when he steals from his TRUE and HONEST [[fans]] and [[sweethearts]]. [[Megagi]], [[Jiggliami]] and [[Layla]] were taken from, respectively, [[Megan]], [[Blanca]] and [[Ivy]] after they abandoned him. The character of [[Simonla Rosechu]] was created when Chris took a character [[Evan]] created, Simonchu, and slapped breasts and a china on it. Chris frequently didn't credit original artists when posting fan art to [[deviantART]], and the current [[CWCipedia]] [http://cogsdev.110mb.com/cwcipedia/index.php/Good_Fan_Art fan art page] has no credits whatsoever, apart of a brief mention of [[PandaHalo]]. Yet, in the not-so-unlikely opposite case, if one were to steal Sonichu, there'd be hell to pay.
The coveted art award at his high school [[Manchester_High_School#Graduation|graduation]] would have lost a crap ton of prestige had it been awarded to a cheater like Chris.


==Rule 34==
{{collapsible
[[Image:Chris and Rule 34.jpg|thumb|right|Chris's creations believe that his [[Rule 34]] artwork is "lifelike".]]
|Traced images from the ''Sonichu'' Comic
As Chris has no shame, neither do his pictures. Many of his drawings have been outright explicit and caused quite a stir with people. Of these pictures, the most damning one of all is the infamous [[ShecameforCWC.jpg]], which brought an end to the Megan Saga and cemented the notion that Chris was an incestuous [[pedofork]]. It's these artworks that provoked him to up the age on all of his Sonichus and Rosechus so they can be true, loving couples without any of that messy pedofork undertones.
|<gallery>
Image:Trace1.jpg
Image:Trace2.jpg
Image:Trace3.jpg
Image:Trace4.jpg
Image:Trace5.jpg
Image:Trace6.jpg
Image:Aquateenvssonichu.jpg
Image:SAV-Swindle.jpg
Image:RClina.jpg
Image:PunislavBarrier.jpg
Image:Bumble-Lumba-Bumblebee.jpg
Image:Prowl prower.jpg
Image:SOUNDAXE.JPG
Image:CrackderISthundercracker.jpg
Image:Familyguytrace.png
Image:Cwct1.JPG
</gallery>}}


Still doesn't work, as one of his recent pieces of art ended up getting him tossed out of DeviantArt. Again.
===Rule 34===
{{Honest}}
[[Image:Chris and Rule 34.jpg|thumb|Chris's creations believe that his [[Sonichu and Rosechu's Luv Shack|Rule 34]] artwork is "lifelike".]]
Chris has no shame, and neither does his artwork. Of his many [[Chris and pornography#Art|sexually explicit drawings]], the most damning one of all is [[ShecameforCWC.JPG]], which brought an end to the Megan Saga and cemented the notion that Chris was an incestuous [[pedofork]].  


The pictures below are a group of Rule 34s Chris drew for Sonichu 8. As seen in this gallery, Chris can't even copy bad porn to save his life, with Rosechu turning into a deformed monstrosity in each panel, all for the sake of [[Chris and sex|sex]]. Especially noticeable is the final picture, which shows off a recurring trend in his pictures: the "Glowing Ethereal Cunt of All Ages", in which Chris draws the "[[cum]]" from the woman ''around'' and ''outside'' the vagina instead of from the inside, leading it to have a "glowing" effect.
[[File:TingsArt1.png|thumb|left|Some sexually provacative art from [[Tings Tingz]] that Chris had actually approved of.]]


While all the following images are obviously (bad) Reflecta Sketch tracings of Rule 34 pictures that Chris himself loaded on to his [[Encyclopedia Dramatica|Encycapeeya Dramakka Paysh]], it's not clear whether or not all his other porn drawings are also tracings. It's likely that they are, and the source material Chris stole those from is just not as blatantly obvious.
As seen in this gallery, Chris can't even copy bad porn to save his life, with Rosechu turning into a deformed monstrosity in each panel, all for the sake of [[sex]]. Especially noticeable is the final picture, which shows off a recurring trend in his pictures: the "Glowing Cunt", in which Chris draws the "[[cum]]" from the woman ''around'' and ''outside'' the vagina instead of from the inside, making it appear to glow, or inhabit heavenly clouds.


=== Rule 34 (tracing) gallery ===
It can be reasonably assumed that all of the images in this gallery are traced, and that those not paired plagiarized source material simply have yet to have their "inspirations" discovered.


<center><gallery>
{{collapsible
|Gallery of traced Rule 34 pictures. Incredibly horrific, NSFW, and contains robo-clits. This is your last chance to escape with your sanity.
|<gallery>
Image:Chris-chan Traced.JPG
Image:Chris-chan Traced.JPG
Image:Chris-chan Traced 2.JPG
Image:Chris-chan Traced 2.JPG
Line 99: Line 350:
Image:Chris-chan Traced 4.JPG
Image:Chris-chan Traced 4.JPG
Image:Chris-chan Traced 5.JPG
Image:Chris-chan Traced 5.JPG
</gallery></center>
</gallery>}}
 
===Tomgirl art===
Drawings Chris made since 2011. Some are NSFW.
 
{{collapsible
|Gallery
|<gallery>
File:MyMindIsABlank.jpg|''My Mind Is a Blank'', January 2015.
File:Pink Lemonade.jpg|''Pink Lemonade'', July 2015.
File:26 June 2016 Cole Smithey drawing.jpeg|Caricature of [[Cole Smithey]] burning his money, June 2016.
File:SLGBTQ Sonichu poster.jpeg|Chris's LGBT poster for the Sonichu series, May 2017. The S stands for straight.
File:Sonichu-Planet Dolan.jpeg|Crossover fanart of Sonichu and Planet Dolan, May 2017.
File:Miss Night Star.jpeg |''Miss Night Star'', June 2017, Chris's self-insert imagined as a [[MLP]] character. Note the redrawn Sonichu #0 cover.
File:Night Star crossover MLP.jpeg ‎|Crossover with MLP characters, June 2017.
File:Flat-chested women April 2018.jpg|Flat-chested women, April 2018.
File:Pride Month drawing June 2018.jpg|For Pride Month, June 2018.
</gallery>}}
 
{{collapsible
|Art for [[Catherine]], 2014
|<gallery>
File:TrollTragedy.jpeg
File:TrollTragedydetailA.jpeg|Zoomed in
File:TrollTragedydetailB.jpeg|Another zoom
File:ZappinBoobs.jpeg
File:CandC.jpeg
</gallery>}}
 
===Paid art===
Drawings from Chris's [[eBay]] and [[Etsy]] sales.
{{main|Original Sonichu and Rosechu Drawing}}
{{main|Commissions}}
 
== Sources ==
<references/>


{{Chris and}}
{{Chris and}}
{{Sonichu}}
{{Sonichu}}
[[Category:Chris-chan]]

Latest revision as of 14:06, 27 October 2024

My art style, I feel, is one that would be typically mistaken as child-like, yet there is an elegance that gives its simplicity an appealing charm. This is a style that needs not be overthought, as it is typically to the point.
Chris, talking about his art[1]
"Goddess At Work" (2022), showing Chris working on comic pages in his work room at 14 Branchland Court.
My Mind Is a Blank, January 2015
How Chris sees his self-portraits.

Art has been, and always will be, Chris's selling point. Chris has been involved with some form of art or another throughout his life. He has taken numerous art and design classes in high school, and he holds a degree in computer-aided drafting and design. But despite his extensive education in the visual arts (and relative lack of other discernible skills), his style is quite unique, to say the least.

Ever since the very day Jason Kendrick Howell found out about Chris's creation of Sonichu, many people have taken interest in Chris because of his infamously bad artwork. Ironically, his crude creative abilities are what made him stand out as an artist. Sonichu wouldn't be Sonichu without Chris's art. Encouraging Chris to produce more of it remains a popular objective amongst trolls and weens.


Before we get started with today's critique...

It can be easy to simply write off Chris as a bad artist without asking why. But of course, visual art is subjective – there are a multitude of reasons why someone might not like a particular work, and there are bound to be people who will like it. Different styles suit different artists (and viewers), and realism isn't exactly the gold standard of good art. The fact that people commission Chris is proof that he isn't objectively a failed artist. After all, he sold more art than Van Gogh ever did in his lifetime.

Chris is no naive artist – he took art classes throughout his schooling. He is most likely familiar with the process of artistic critiques in an academic setting. This article will reflect that process.

Instead of outright praising or bashing Chris's art, this critique will offer constructive criticism. It will examine strong and weak points of Chris's art in an objective, taste-neutral manner. It will examine all media but place special emphasis on his most proficient medium: drawing. The article will also consider the context of Chris's art. Finally, it will consider ways he has improved his craft, aspects that can be improved, and techniques he is outright unwilling to improve.

Weak points

Exercise of skills and improvement in craft

Not bad for a grade-schooler.

Chris does not seem to consider his artistic skill in need of revision; he is always fully satisfied by the first attempt at a drawing he makes. Naturally, being an artist of that caliber, Chris takes it upon himself to criticize the art that his True and Loyal Fanbase send to him, and is quick to point out the myriad of "flaws" in each work.[2][3]

Chris has said he spends "an hour at most" drawing a comic page and about a half-hour coloring it.[4] He does not seem to be aware of the fact that producing the kind of high-quality artwork that fans expect in a good comic strip is very labor-intensive and can easily take hours, sometimes days, even with professional software programs like Photoshop. He also doesn't seem to understand, or care, that any good artist will draw a scene multiple times before they publish it, especially if there are mistakes. In pretty much any episode of Sonichu, you will be sure to find at least one mistake Chris has made that he refuses to redo and simply colors over. One good example is the scene from Chris and Ivy going to a hotel for hanky-panky.[5] If you look at the scene, you can see multiple mistakes that any artist would have seen as a reason to redo the picture. Chris started to draw his balls (via tracing), but decided he didn't like the proportions that presented, so he decided to keep the start of the trace and just add some "speed lines". If you look at the picture of Ivy you will see that Chris messed up a bit around her face but decided that instead of redoing it, he'd just color over it. He also messed up a bit on her right breast; he drew one too small and decided to make it bigger, by just adding another curved line.

At times, he would expand Sonichu stories in summary form on CWCipedia, a medium better equipped to keep up with his racing, easily distracted imagination. Everything he says or writes, he considers being a part of his comic's continuity partly because it is easier to record these euphoric and fleeting bouts of inspiration as they occur rather than days, weeks, months, or even years later in comic form.

Chris's art has improved in recent years: compare the original Sonichu 0 cover to his later covers. The amount in which he has improved, though, is up for debate.

Choices of materials and technology

Chris's tools.

Chris believes that his so-called "hand-drawn style" is superior to art produced by any other means. This is due to Chris's hatred to change what he has already learned and his belief, as a consequence of his ego, that his method is the best by virtue of being his.

Obviously, Chris's skill cannot compensate for the poor materials he uses. He does his work a disservice by using tools that are the cheapest available: copy paper, Pentel RSVP ballpoint pens, and Crayola washable markers.[6] These happen to be the tools he has used since childhood.

Far from archival quality, his art has sometimes shown signs of wrinkling as soon as it has been finished. Chris has defended his practice of rampant textwalling as a way to "save marker ink."[7]

When Chris wants to alter a panel, but does not want to put in the effort to redraw the entire page, his method to fix it is to draw a piece on another page, cut it out, and glue it over the original drawing. This can be seen in revisions to Sonichu 15.

While Chris has claimed at various times to use Adobe Photoshop to create his characters and edit his comics,[8][9][10] he has only ever been seen using Adobe PhotoDeluxe,[11][12] with which he created his slanderous head-swap of Clyde's buddy Matt. This is in spite of the fact that PhotoDeluxe is intended for scanning and touching up photographs, and Photoshop (which Chris claims to own) would be better suited for the kind of general-purpose image editing and head-swapping that Chris does. In addition, PhotoDeluxe is a fossil of a program that hasn't been supported by Adobe since 2002. Chris's claim in Mailbag 3 that he uses "a past version" of Photoshop[13] could imply that he is confusing PhotoDeluxe for a part of the Photoshop line, or that, if he really does use Photoshop, the revision he owns is just as woefully out-of-date as his ancient PhotoDeluxe program.

Chris's font of choice for most of the Sonichu comics was Comic Sans, a font almost universally condemned for being overused, childish, unprofessional, and ugly; serious designers generally only use it as a last resort or for ironic effect, since better handwritten fonts are available for purchase.[14][15] However, starting from Sonichu #12-9 onward, he switched to Proxima Nova.

Drawing techniques

Strange pen grips can be corrected with the assistance of school teachers. Chris slept through these lessons.

Chris has never even learned to hold a pen correctly. Instead of holding the front of the pen with the thumb and forefinger, he draws with his index finger sticking out and bent around the pen. Give this a try and see how long it takes for you to get carpal tunnel.

In CWC - Hand Drawn Original (2009), Live Drawing Streams (2017), and Over the shoulder colouring stream (2023), Chris demonstrated his drawing technique on video.

Wearing gym gloves while drawing.

During 2019, Chris hampered his ability further by wearing his gym gloves while drawing.

I don’t want to deal with the constant pencil sharpening and all that trash.
Chris giving one of his reasons for why he uses a pen for line art[16]

While most artists will produce multiple sketch versions of a single drawing, often layered on top of one another, Chris is so confident in his innate artistic ability that his first step in a page of Sonichu is drawing the final line art in pen before coloring it in with Crayola markers. If he makes a mistake, he shrugs it off and continues. There is no post-processing beyond adding text to word balloons with MS Paint and PhotoDeluxe. Attempts to inform him that digital coloring is more efficient and far less expensive than wasting gallons of marker ink filling in monocolor backgrounds have failed.

ChrisChanColoringPenGrip2023.png

Visual style and most artistic fundamentals

Nice arms you got there, Chris.
Try and work out what's meant to be happening here.
sonichu had kind of a kiddy art style, which i guess was your point. [...]
i thought you meant it as an avant-garde thing, to make a statment
like, ironically bad
Jackie[17]

Before the comics, Chris attempted realism for work in oil pastel, charcoal, and graphite, presumably for art classes in school. The results can be seen in the gallery below. While he did spend some time in high school taking art classes, most professional artists heavily study artistic fundamentals before venturing off into the territory of stylization. Without knowing how things appear in reality, it is difficult to distort properties to an aesthetically pleasing effect. Chris trusts in his abilities yet lacks proficiency in the most important fundamentals. This overconfidence results in the Sonichu comics looking like they were drawn by a grade-schooler.

Chris started out with a cartoony style for the comic book, full of techniques consistent with early efforts at drawing by small children. Things changed as Chris got into anime and manga, and sought to emulate them to impress his gal-pal at the time, Megan Schroeder. Like many amateur western artists, he copies only the surface elements of the anime style: big eyes, pentagonal heads, speed lines, emotions. These elements were simply laid over his original "style" with no adjustment, and did nothing to improve the quality of his work.

This woman has three elbows.

Chris has no understanding of classical anatomy, proportion in figure drawing, or even basic form. His characters are drawn using simple shapes – colored-in outlines, without any shading, ever – and even so, he is unable to keep the shapes consistent to any degree. These shapes rarely have any form at all, leading to characters having a "cardboard cutout" quality to them: head-on body with a slightly turned head. Though he lacks the skills to make even decent simple poses, Chris has the balls to attempt foreshortening on occasion- with disastrous results.

In his hastiness to draw pornography of himself and Ivy, Chris seems to have forgotten that wrists and forearms are incapable of twisting in such a way without causing serious and extremely painful dislocation injuries.
Something's not right with this picture...

Characters have no set proportions: limbs morph, heads change size, and faces become unrecognizable; it's only by the color scheme that we can guess which character is which. For example, in the opening of Sonichu #11, the children tend to noticeably get deformed in a different manner in each panel, despite the fact that they're drawn as just an oval for the head, a rectangle for the body, and smaller ovals for the arms and legs. Just to be sure we know who's who (a job that is taken care of by the artwork in any normal comic) Chris sometimes relies on labelling characters with text and arrows. Beyond his differently-colored eyes and Sonichu medallion, no two Chrises have ever looked alike, or even remotely resembled the actual Chris. The character sizes are also inconsistent, which is strange considering most of the characters appear to be about the same size: in most drawings where Sonichu is carrying Rosechu, Rosechu seems to shrink.

Chris is an expert at proportion.

Finer details of human anatomy have long escaped him; because Chris never draws women with pronounced hips, the results tend to resemble children or men (such as with the character Lovely Weather), with unfortunate implications in either case. Chris also doesn't seem to realize that drawing techniques that work in other media might not work in cartoons. For example, he sometimes draws himself with almond-shaped eyes. While no real person's eyelids are perfectly circular like a cartoon character, cartoonists generally reserve non-circular eyes for Asian characters.

This car will either always veer left or never run at all.

Despite boasting that his "drawings of perspective viewpoints are surpassive [sic]"[18] due to his training in CADD, Chris constantly fails at perspective, with objects implied to be far-away depicted too large. This is evident in his many vehicle designs, where the front is usually a direct frontal (90 degree) view, regardless of the view angle of other sides. This inability to demonstrate parallel lines renders the car distorted. The lack of any concept of shading only further destroys any semblance of perspective; legs that are implied to be bent forward at the knee only end up looking shorter.

Possibly the worst offender is Chris's constant omission of backgrounds. Most scenes happen only on the white backdrop of the paper. Readers are apparently supposed to infer what the background looks like based on context, similar to some daily newspaper comic strips. Thus, simply drawing a wide-angle shot of the scenery as the first (usually transitional) panel in a scene would suffice. Combined with his inability to make a proper layout, many action scenes end up becoming a jumble of characters moving around without regards to sequence. The reason he does this is probably the same as the reason why he textwalls so often: to "save marker ink," meaning he's lazy. (Incidentally, the proper use of white space and the conservation of painted space is a key element in East Asian art, but despite his anime obsession he is unlikely to have heard of this).

A related phenomenon is simply drawing characters as floating disembodied heads. The deus ex machina/exposition machine is the biggest victim of this. Once again, Chris couldn't bother to draw a full body. Thus, combining all known forms of "marker ink conservation", some pages are just a bunch of literal talking heads speaking walls of text.

Chris owns at least one book about drawing manga, as seen in My Half of A Whole New World for Kacey. The book in itself covers everything to do with portraying couples, including images of couples in bed making love. Whether Chris bought it to better draw out his delusional fantasies or for more material to mass debate to isn't known, but either way, the book taught him nothing.

Character design

See also: Written characterization

A large portion of the Sonichu cast is clearly derivative of existing characters. In addition to the obvious Sonic the Hedgehog recolors, Chris has lifted designs from any anime, video game, or even Western animation he is fond of, with no regard for visual consistency.

Beyond that, he doesn't even bother trying to design better clothing for his characters. Most of them wear stereotypical "basic" clothing, and Chris himself wears his usual clown shirts and pants. With the sole exception of Meg-chan, every female that shows up in his comics wears high-heeled dress shoes.

Even when the source of Chris's plagiarism is readily apparent, these lifts can still add up to less than the sum of their parts. Inspired by the fusion characters of Dragon Ball Z and God of War, Collosal Chan looks more like a hobo than a fusion of Chris and Chris-Chan Sonichu. Though clearly, his own effort to design baby Pokémon, Sonee and Rosey look more unnerving than adorable.

Fan (dis)service

Insta-boner.
I am not a gorey artist; just accept the Fan Service of panty-shots and get over yourselves.
[19]

Fan service is a term used to describe something that is meant to tease or please the audience. It can refer to any content seen as an effort to appease the desires of fans, but for the sake of this section, it's used primarily to describe scenes of a sexually titillating nature.

Since his discovery by the Internet, Chris has inserted increasingly large amounts of fan service into the initially tame Sonichu in an effort to assert the heterosexuality of himself and his characters. The range of fan service in Sonichu includes panty shots, Rosechu's stripping, cameltoe indentations, and even a full sex scene followed by four pages of text and diagrams describing Sonichu and Rosechu's sexual anatomy.

He made sure to draw Battery-Charge Heart's skirt so short, we can see the carpet matches the drapes.

Due to his lack of artistic faculties, much of Chris's depictions of sexuality are highly unsettling to most readers. Any attempts to add "sexy" material come across as Chris's own wish-fulfillment or self-interest, rather than attempts by Chris to please his audience.

While the point of fan service is to hint at sexuality in an otherwise clean work meant for general audiences, Sonichu's sexual content hides nothing and disturbs many, despite the fact that Chris has always viewed Sonichu as a comic intended for children. Chris tried to justify putting panty shots in a children's comic by saying...

Children will likely be seeing the same things in real life, so mellow out and let them learn a bit, and further educate the children with discussions.
Children will be seeing furry porn in real life.[20]

Strong points

Chris is far from the worst artist ever; there are several strong points to his work that set him apart from other poor artists.

Color choices and coordination

Chris does get color coordination. Most of the color schemes he uses in his work look decent. Being Chris, he still fails occasionally, such as with the CWCipedia color scheme. Still, color is one of his few strong points, at least compared to the rest of his art style. As evidenced by most of his websites, custom console skins, and a good chunk of his character designs, Chris's favorite colors appear to be yellow and blue. That color combination is hard to get wrong, which is why so many cartoon characters (from the Simpsons to SpongeBob) have yellow skin. Chris also appears to be fond of the red, white, and blue compliment, judging by his trademark polo shirt.

Despite excelling in this fundamental field, Chris does struggle with coloring rainbows in the correct order of ROYGBIV.

Dexterity

Despite his awkward pen grip, Chris seems to have a mostly steady hand. His penmanship is neat and legible, and most of his mistakes stem from writing the wrong letter and scribbling/doctoring it into the right one, instead of any kind of actual handwriting disorder. His most recent driver's license signature appears to be quite flourished and feminine. Many artists with unorthodox hand techniques claim their grips can actually give them more control over the pen, and even trained calligraphers don't always stick to the standard grip that most are taught in kindergarten.

Chris never seemed to struggle in the dexterity department – he can write and draw more neatly than folks with poor fine motor skills. He doesn't have an issue with other activities requiring dexterity, such as typing or playing video games. The autism papers don't even mention poor fine motor coordination, which is relatively common (but not universal) among autistics. Even our own article on Chris's diagnosis doesn't touch his dexterity, only his gross motor skills. For once, Chris's autism isn't the culprit!

If Chris actually took his time and learned patience, his line work could be phenomenal.

Reach

See also: Warhol / Chris Chan

Chris has undoubtedly become a pop culture phenomenon, while many other artists who spent decades refining their craft can go their entire lives without selling many paintings – or any at all. Looking at medallions alone, Chris has sold more works than Frida Kahlo even produced in her lifetime. Chris's works have been referenced in master theses, published essays, and other academic media countless times. Judging by artists like Van Gogh or Warhol, GodBear knows if Chris's works will end up in a museum some time after his passing. The fact that people are compelled to look at Chris's work at all speaks volumes.

Is art even Sonichu's main failing?

Main article: Chris and writing

Complex drawing is not mandatory for making a good comic. Chris's art style is arguably more complex than the style Charles Schulz used for Peanuts. Diary of a Wimpy Kid and xkcd get the job done with simple stick figures. Some artistically challenged cartoonists will even ditch the pen for a nice camera to create a photo comic. These genres might not carry museum-quality art, but the cartoonists generally make up for it with clever writing.

However, Sonichu doesn't even have that to fall back on. Chris does no preparatory writing or preliminary revision; his narrative is wholly improvised and shifts regularly. He cannot write clear, succinct dialogue, and he has little regard for visual clarity.

He doesn't understand how graphic novels are supposed to work as a narrative through sequential images, and instead presents the series more like a storyboard for a hypothetical television series. As a whole, the series has excessive dialogue, something better suited for a novel or television script. It often uses literal phrases (e.g., "cuts grass") as a substitute for visual action and/or comic onomatopoeia. Chris divides each volume of Sonichu into "episodes", a concept popular in TV land, but unheard of in the comic book industry. Perhaps Chris isn't interested in art or comics – he's just interested in Sonichu.

Other peculiarities

"Me" arrow

An example of the "me" arrow

In some artwork from the latter 2010s, Chris put a small "Me" sign, often with an arrow, next to the character (or characters) meant to represent him. It is unclear why Chris does this, although the usage correlates with him exploring the concept of alternate realities as a coping mechanism.

Chris and digital art

A blocky and low-resolution self portrait: Chris's foray into iPad art.

Much like his opinions on alcohol, LGBT+ folks, butt play, and the holy HEXBox, Chris's thoughts on digital art have evolved from outright bashing to a much more open outlook.

During the classic era

In the early 2000s, Chris was somewhat open to the digital arts. He created Sonichu in a high school computer graphics class, and he would brag and boast about his CADD major. Things changed soon after.

Chris would often state that using new technology creatively provides an unfair advantage in the service of inferior results. Repeatedly, he has called Asperchu "blocky and low resolution" because it was drawn with a tablet, this is most likely because Chris thinks that doing digital art instead of the traditional way makes results comparable to poor MS Paint drawings that are more familiar with him. In one of his phone calls to Alec Benson Leary, Chris said his hand-drawn art had "more character" (never mind that tablet art is technically hand-drawn art anyway).

A change of heart: Chris gets an iPad

Chris began opening up to digital media in the 2010s. In May 2020, during his phase of role-playing as Sonichu, Chris used his COVID-19 Economic Impact Payment check on an iPad, software, and accessories for drawing digital art. He attempted a drawing of Sonichu, and he complained about how hard the software was to use.[21]

Will Chris switch to digital?

On 14 July 2021, Chris tagged the Crayola company in a Twitter thread, complaining about inconsistencies between similar- and same-colored markers.[22]

A Twitter user asked Chris if he would switch to digital art, stating "it might be better for you in the long run". Instead of defending his marker-on-paper style like usual, he responded favorably:

Eventually, likely so. I have been so very busy to totally find my niche with a tablet and stylus pen setup. Sonichu gave my body a conscious start on the setup with the iPad, but that’s a major Gonna need more free time to practice with it. I haven’t found the right timing yet
Chris [23]

Notably, Chris admitted that digital art takes effort, and he seems willing to make the switch in the future after some practice. Time will tell if he does so, now that he has been freed from jail.

Chris's other artistic media

Drawing may be Chris's medium of choice, but he's dabbled in others.

3D Media

One of the replica medals

Chris has produced a line of Sonichu medallions, made out of Crayola fuckin' Model Magic and acrylic paint. In September 2014, Chris started selling replicas of his handcrafted medals, produced to various qualities.

He has made Sonichu Amiibo by Frankensteining multiple Amiibos together and crudely painting them.

Another 3D piece is his Sonic Totem from middle school, which sold on eBay for $1500 USD.

3D printing

Main article: 3D printing

Chris has long held an interest in using 3D-printing technology, although the most he has done with it is plagiarize files for printing, then hand-paint them.

Photography and Videography

Main article: Chris and cinematography

Video media has been some of Chris's most frequently produced content. The lacking production quality is frequently compensated for by Chris's emotional theatrics.

Animation

Chris at one point tried taking up a new medium in the form of animation. Using the Nintendo DSi program Flipnote Studio, Chris took his drawing to a whole new level...or least, he could have. His drawing degraded greatly when doing artwork here, mostly due to using the DS's stylus pen. When doing animations, his characters have very little fluid movement to them and they seem to jerk and wobble, as if they're characters from Ed, Edd n Eddy or Home Movies. The best one to tell of this is the Don'tGetTrolled! animation; you can tell which part was animated by Chris and which part was animated by the original author, 8-Bit, because Chris's artwork just wobbles in a distorted fashion.

Music

Main article: Chris and music

Chris is a passionate musician who has self-released three albums, all of which feature him tone-deafly singing derivatives songs on top of famous music.

Sewing

Chris the seamstress.

Chris "restored" his classic striped shirt himself before attempting to sell it. As said shirt spent three years in a water-filled trash bag and was damaged beyond repairability, it didn't work out that well.

Spray-painting

Main article: Shoe Colouring

On 3 August 2018, Chris tackled shoe customization and spent an hour spray-painting a pair of Adidas in Sonichu colors.

Costume Design

Main article: Chris and cosplaying

Continuing his trend of using the cheapest materials possible while incorporating only the vaguest of likenesses, Chris's foray in cosplay is par for the course with his hand-drawings. They're poorly made, not thought out, and Chris likely believes they're professional quality.

Originality and plagiarism

Main article: Things Chris has ripped off

When it comes to originality, Chris has absolutely none.

Sonichu is a fine blend of Chris's personal life and a wide variety of recognizable copyrighted elements. Just about any existing medium that Chris has ever expressed a fondness for appears in some capacity.

Chris has a long history of claiming all credit for fan characters initially acknowledged as being created by others and offered for use in Chris's comics. The first of these were Megagi, Jiggliami, and Layla, but the most infamous instance, and the one that Chris defended the most fervently, was Simonla Rosechu.

At the same time, Chris once had a policy of threatening nonexistent legal action against the creators of any Sonichu fan art he could find, and was worked into a magnificent rage over the Sonichu-derivative fan parody Asperchu.

As well, Chris has gone so far as to take a video, the aforementioned Don'tGetTrolled!, and alter it to suit his needs. Now, granted, there were other videos done using that same video, but where they just altered the stick character or sped up the video in the same vein as a YouTube Poop, Chris completely and utterly altered the video to suit his needs so that a humorous song about trolling is turned into Chris's mouthpiece to destroy Freedom of Speech to make the Internet safer for him.

Art gallery

School art

Seen below is a selection of Chris's public school art assignments, from a slideshow on Chris's homemade DVD. At his high school graduation, Chris expected to be "Highly Recognized" for his "ARTISTIC TALENT", represented in this body of work. When he was not, he cried.[24] This work was produced under the supervision of a professional art instructor and the incentive for Chris to give each piece more thought, care and attention than he now prefers to when creating only for his own satisfaction. Despite this, they're still terrible. Note that some readers may find several of these images inadvertently terrifying.

Gallery

Tracing

Tracing is an art technique where another piece of art, in whole or part, is copied along with its outlines. As a means of producing original art claimed as one's own, tracing is a form of plagiarism.

Images traced from existing copyrighted content appear regularly in Sonichu. Chris traces with the Reflecta Sketch, a long-discontinued toy tracing kit produced by Spin Master. The kit comes with a reflective piece of plastic where an original can be placed to the left and the reflection is used for tracing an outline. This is why most traced images in Sonichu are mirror images of the original work. Due to their poor quality, consistent in appearance with Sonichu art that is not traced, these traced images often go unnoticed as tracing. The fact that Chris fails even at tracing is a surprise to no one.

Alternatively, Chris uses these images as references and simply tries to draw images free-hand based on them. This is no worse than directly tracing the outlines, but better explains why his results are so distorted in respect to their references. Chris probably uses a combination of both techniques (as some images look closer to their originals than others), showing an utter lack of skill and originality either way.

The coveted art award at his high school graduation would have lost a crap ton of prestige had it been awarded to a cheater like Chris.

Traced images from the Sonichu Comic

Rule 34

HonestContent.jpg
This article is rated M for Honest Content

It may contain content deemed not safe for work. Reader discretion is advised.
Chris's creations believe that his Rule 34 artwork is "lifelike".

Chris has no shame, and neither does his artwork. Of his many sexually explicit drawings, the most damning one of all is ShecameforCWC.JPG, which brought an end to the Megan Saga and cemented the notion that Chris was an incestuous pedofork.

Some sexually provacative art from Tings Tingz that Chris had actually approved of.

As seen in this gallery, Chris can't even copy bad porn to save his life, with Rosechu turning into a deformed monstrosity in each panel, all for the sake of sex. Especially noticeable is the final picture, which shows off a recurring trend in his pictures: the "Glowing Cunt", in which Chris draws the "cum" from the woman around and outside the vagina instead of from the inside, making it appear to glow, or inhabit heavenly clouds.

It can be reasonably assumed that all of the images in this gallery are traced, and that those not paired plagiarized source material simply have yet to have their "inspirations" discovered.

Gallery of traced Rule 34 pictures. Incredibly horrific, NSFW, and contains robo-clits. This is your last chance to escape with your sanity.

Tomgirl art

Drawings Chris made since 2011. Some are NSFW.

Gallery
Art for Catherine, 2014

Drawings from Chris's eBay and Etsy sales.

Main article: Original Sonichu and Rosechu Drawing
Main article: Commissions

Sources

Chris and...

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Psyche: CopingManipulationMental healthcareNostalgiaReality

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Expression: ArtCensorshipEnglishLanguageMusicOratorySpanishWriting

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Business: Brand loyaltyBusinessCopyrightMoneyNegotiationWork

Technology: CamerasElectronicsThe InternetScienceTelevisionVideo Games