Chris and art

Chris's first known drawing from when he was 15.

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 taken interest in Chris because of his infamously bad artwork. Encouraging Chris to produce more of it remains a popular troll objective.

The sad part is, this is the closest Chris has to an actual "skill." It's no wonder he's never been able to keep a job.

Chris and the medium

Exercise of skills and improvement in craft

Not bad for a grade schooler. Sadly, he peaked in the 1980s.

Since Chris first started drawing, his artwork has been abysmal. The extent to which it has improved since the first time he drew Sonic the Hedgehog is accidental. Chris has never considered his artistic skill in need of improvement; he is always fully satisfied by the first attempt at a drawing he makes.

Because he believes his art is already perfect, Chris does not see the need to practice. He does no drawing exercises. He cannot look for room for improvement in his drawings because he refuses to accept the idea that his drawings can be in any way flawed.

Chris revealed in the Mailbag that he spends "an hour at most" drawing a comic page and about a half-hour coloring it. In other words, he invests only a fraction of the time most serious artists put into their work, and it shows.

Chris seems to view the act of creating as almost a chore. Because to him every idea he has is perfect from the moment it pops into his head, creating is just a matter of recording his genius. Chris enjoys expanding Sonichu stories in summary form on CWCipedia, a medium better equipped to keep up with his racing and easily distractible imagination. Chris considers everything he says or writes to be 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 believes that everything he creates is inherently worthy of adoration, and that it will bring him legions of adoring fans and the attention of women.

Comic writing and structure

Main article: Chris and writing

Chris is as poor a writer as he is an artist. Chris does no preparatory writing or preliminary revision, his narrative is wholly improvised and shifts regularly, he cannot write clear, succinct dialogue, and has little regard for visual clarity.

Choices of materials and technology

Crayola is the official art supplier for the Sonichu franchise, whether they like it or not.

Chris believes that his so-called "hand-drawing 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, ballpoint pens and Crayola Magic Markers. These happen to be the tools he has used since childhood.

Chris's artwork is far from archival quality, and in some instances shows 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."

Chris appears to have some version of Photoshop at his disposal (as seen in the "Spider-Man-fucking Clyde" saga), but uses it sparingly outside of lettering. Chris's font of choice is Comic Sans, a font that is almost universally condemned as overused and ugly.

Chris believes that using new technology creatively provides an unfair advantage in the service of inferior results. Chris has consistently called Asperchu "blocky and low resolution" because it was drawn with a tablet. In one of phone calls to Alec Benson Leary, Chris said his hand drawn art had "more character." He also thinks that his web page was awesome because it was made from "notepad scratch," rather than with a text editor program.

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.

While most artists will produce multiple sketch versions of a single drawing, often layered on top of one another, Chris's confidence in his innate artistic ability is such that his first step in a page of Sonichu is drawing the final art in pen.

Visual style and anatomy

Nice arms you got there, Chris.

Before the comics, Chris attempted realism for work in oil pastel, charcoal and graphite, presumedly for art classes in school. The results are buried deep in the Scrapbook of Fail and meet Chris's usual standards of quality.

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. These art elements were simply laid over his original "style" with no adjustment.

Chris draws characters as colored-in outlines, with no anatomy or proportion. What's worse is that even though his characters are simple shapes, they aren't even consistent simple shapes. Limbs morph, heads change size, and faces become unrecognizable; it's only by color scheme that we can guess which character is which. Beyond his differently-colored eyes and Sonichu medallion, no two Chrises have ever looked alike, or even remotely resembled the actual Chris.

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 gawk at during Mass debating isn't known. Either way, the book has taught him nothing.

Character design

See also Characterization

A large portion of Sonichu's 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, Colossal Chan looks more like a hobo than a fusion of Chris and Chris-Chan Sonichu. Though clearly his own effort to design Baby Pokemon, Sonee and Rosey look more unnerving than adorable.

Fan Service

Fan service is a term used to describe something that is meant to tease or please the audience. Fan service could be a cameo, a shout out, or a titillating scene in any work of fiction.

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, Rosechus stripping, cameltoe indentations, and even a full sex scene followed by four pages of text and diagrams describing Sonichu and Rosechu's sexual anatomy.

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, 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 and the industry

Main article: Chris and the industry

In the Sonichu Chronicles and Chris's resume, it's revealed that Chris is under the impression that his art is of professional quality, and expects to enter the comic and video game industries. His résumé states a desire to produce Sonichu comics under contract for Marvel Entertainment or Archie Comics. By all indications, this is an idle wish as Chris expects to be approached by these companies first. Chris has consistently shown little comprehension of, or interest in learning about, how the creative industries actually work.

Originality

He has none. Let's leave it at that.

Plagiarism

See also: Chris and copyright

Sonichu is a fine blend of a wide variety of recognizable copyrighted elements. Just about any existing media 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 work Asperchu.

Tracing

Tracing is an art technique where another piece of art, in whole or part, is copied along 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 since 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.

Traced images from the Sonichu Comic

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Rule 34

Chris's creations believe that his Rule 34 artwork is "lifelike".

As Chris has no shame, 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.

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.

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 and NSFW, this is your last chance to escape with your sanity

Gallery of Art

These are from the DVD slideshow, and seem to come from Chris's art classes in school, showing just how long he has had the "perfect on the first try" mentality.

Gallery of Chris's art

Defending the honor of junk food everywhere! Sculpted in such a way that it looks like a toilet at first blush. Fox McCloud one month after crash-landing in the middle of Africa. The result of Rosechu's late-term abortion. The teacher quickly thought up something to keep Chris occupied for the rest of the lesson. Coming soon from Franklin Mint... Ancient relic of the Cherokian Clan. It doesn't catch dreams. It stares into your soul. Sad to say, it was originally Chris who came up with the "Long fish is loooooo oooooooooooong" meme. Scan of a print of a photograph of drawings. How very meta! Autism is in Living Room. Autism is in Wife. Autism is in Children and - well - Autism is in Life. A rare shot of Chris's largely forgotten Pokémons, Espanolic and Vegaton. Banjo, the champion of Christianity and bright colors. In the first lesson, the computer graphics teachers usually say something like "don't go crazy with the effects, m'kay?" Chris never listens. Magic Eye picture that reveals absolutely nothing. We tried. The teacher who traumatized Chris wasn't was actually the principal - it was the art teacher, who forced Chris to make a drawing with prickly-wicklies. An ash tray that shoots tobacco straight to the Sun - powered by dark magic. It's... off-center. Sonic unfocuses. Chris's shield was eaten. Following in Ed Gein's footsteps. Art class pictures usually have some sort of central idea the teacher gave to the students. Chris is unable to communicate it to us. 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?

TL;DR

Chris is an anti-artist.