Drawing the Line Between Oil Painting and Line Art

Drawing the Line Between Oil Painting and Line Art

Introduction 

I find it much easier to complete a task when the task is enjoyable. Motions seem to flow out swiftly and easily. This is how I felt while studying my topic. I have never really had free reign to study a subject of my choice- there have always been small regulations preventing me from doing everything I wanted to do. This was easy because it was so fun. I never thought research could be fun, but I really loved doing it for my topic. You are probably itching to know what exactly I was studying… well I’ll cut the suspense.

My topic of research is finding the differences in recognition and popularity between two well known styles of art. I chose line art and elaborate oils because of how contrasting the two are. The reason I chose this topic was because I wanted to choose something that motivated me to write well. I needed something that sparked my interest so that I would want to create a good paper. Art is a big piece of my life, it always has been. anything that has to do with art is interesting to me, so I thought it would be a good motivator for this kind of research. Line art is most recognized as a “contour” drawing of any subject.  It is easy to make and does not require much skill. This style is quite simple and is appreciated more in this generation than it has ever been. Oils on the other hand are complicated and take lots of skill and time. Their subjects are usually landscapes or people. Appreciation for oils is still heavily circulated in this age.

I have seen a vast array of these two styles on various forms of social media including Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It was difficult to decide which platform I wanted to use to conduct my research, but I finally settled on Instagram because of its aesthetic nature. I have no doubt that my findings would have been hugely different from what they are if I had used a different platform like Twitter. I decided against using a more word-based social media because I was doing an entire study on art! Art is a visual representation, so I wanted to use a more visual vessel to find research.   

Predictions

 Naturally I have some predictions about what the results may be. I personally think that the elaborate oil style will take the lead in likes and followers because of how complicated it is. I just think that something more time-consuming and complex will be favored over simplicity. I know that the line art style is a very popular preference in the modern world, but I think tradition and beauty is what’s going to win in this setting. The reason I believe the elaborate oil style will have more popularity is because everyone admires a meticulous masterpiece. I think there is still a mass amount of appreciation for oil paintings, and that’s why I think this style will take the lead. 

This is my prediction, not my opinion. My preference of style is definitely the line art. I admire the style of contouring and I think that it is more interesting and relevant than other styles such as oil paintings. I want to say that I will not let my personal bias outweigh the odds of what style is going to have more likes and follows. I am going to use a method that reciprocates fairness for both styles.  

Review

Overall, my plan is to use Instagram as a vessel to find five accounts that exploit elaborate oil paintings, and five accounts that have line art. I am going to create a brand new account so that the account does not have any of my past likes or searches. It will be a clean slate used only to follow the most popular accounts of the two styles I have chosen. I plan to search for “line art”, then follow the first five accounts that pop up, then search for “oil art” and do the same. I will then choose some recent posts from each account and average the amount of likes for each account. This will tell me how popular each account is. I want to also look at the comments and find the most common keywords that occur in each style. This is not extremely important information, but it will show what opinions are most common in each style. I also want to collect one or two surveys from my peers asking how much they like The particular styles in order to show what everyday people think about this art. I will make sure the people I conduct surveys on are not relatively savvy with art so I do not get biased results. Hopefully throughout all of this research I will not run into many hiccups, but it is to be expected. The troubles I think I will run into deal with finding good accounts on Instagram. I could look up “line art” only to find an account with three followers, or I could make a mistake when calculating the average number of likes for an account. These are just guesses, hopefully everything will be pretty straightforward.

Question

So, now for the big question. Which style of art will outweigh the other in popularity on Instagram? Elaborate oils, or line art? 

Review and Method

So I explained a little bit of what the plan for my method was, but here’s what I did. The first thing I did to kick off the start of my research was to make my new Instagram account. Since I was making a new account, I decided to post a few pieces of my own art just for fun. After I made my page more aesthetic, I went to go find five accounts for each style of art that I chose. I started off by just searching for “elaborate oil art” to see what would happen. This threw me off by pulling up the username for anything related to elaborate oil art. These pages had about 11 followers, and this is far below what I wanted for my research. So I scrapped that idea. I tried shortening my searches by just typing in “oil” or “oil paintings”. Or “line art”. It hardly helped, it pretty much did the same thing. I started to believe that I wouldn’t even be able to do this project, but then I remembered I could look up hashtags with the words “oil paintings” or “line art”. This is where I gathered all of the accounts I followed. I looked up “#oilpainting” and followed the first five accounts that popped up. I then looked up ”#lineart” and did the same thing. This method worked out perfectly and gave me a good variety of each style to work with.

 Here is a list of the user names of every account that I followed in order of my choosing: eugene.shadko, jeremysandersstudio, r.s.lana, christinelashelyart, leecraigmile, ellem.art, flowsoftly, onlinesketching, alicelovesdrawing and withoneline. These were all chosen from the tags that I searched. The first five are oil painting accounts, and the last five on the list are line art accounts. The first account on the list, eugene.shadko, Is an artist who paints a variety of faces on canvases with oil paint. His style is very rough and he does not include a vast amount of detail in each face. His paintings are still very beautiful and dramatic. He has 9,453 followers. jeremysandersstudio is an oil painter who most commonly used boats for his subject matter. These boat landscapes are very detailed and colorful. He has 4,431 followers. r.s.lana paints with more dreamscape ideals. This artist also uses oil as their media and paints in a more abstract manner. This artist has 8,388 followers. christinelashleyart Is an oil painter who mainly paints landscapes and flowers. Her work is extremely detailed. She has about 11,700 followers. Lastly in the oil painting accounts, we have leecraigmile. He is an oil painter who creates extremely detailed and surreal paintings. They look like a picture. He has 2192 followers. No, getting into our line artists, we first have ellem.art. This artist does very faint contours of people. The lines are very thin and not detailed much at all. She has 1213 followers. Next we have flowsofty, A line artist who also uses people for their subject. This page actually has more detailed art that is somewhat sexual, and they have 423,000 followers. onlinesketching is an artist who does line drawings from their computer. Their pieces vary in style, and they have 874 followers. alicelovesdrawing is another line artist, but she focuses primarily on flowers. Nothing else. Her work is very detailed and pretty. She has 573,000 followers. Lastly we look at withoneline. This artist tends to use animals and people for his subject. His line art is pretty detailed, but not extremely elaborate. He has 88,000 followers. As you can see some of the accounts had so many followers that I could not get a precise number. I have tried to check exactly how many followers they have, but Instagram prevents me from uncovering that information. I was still able to work out the average number of likes and followers for each account, so it wasn’t a major setback. Though it did hinder me from being exact in my numbers. 

After I averaged the amount of followers for each style, I went on to average the likes and comments for each account, then each style. This part was extremely time-consuming. I was scared that I would make mistakes and then have to start over, but nothing too serious happened. I did have to recount at times when I got distracted, but this was not a major problem. Just to make sure my work was exact, I recounted once after to make sure everything was correct. The way I did this was not too complicated. I started by looking at each account and deciding what would be the best step forward. I thought that maybe I could find their most popular five posts and average the likes, but I decided against this because it ended up being too complicated. I discovered that my best bet was to gather the 10 most recent posts of each account, document the amount of likes and comments for each post, then average the amount of likes for each account. I put the likes and comments under columns then double checked after I averaged each one. This was one of the most tedious moments of my work, but once I fell into a rhythm I found that I actually enjoyed it. I also found that the results from averaging were not what I expected them to be, but I will tell you about that later. 

One more aspect of my research had to do with the surveys I conducted. I wanted to give the survey to myself to have my opinions embedded in my research, but I also gave the survey to my grandmother and to my boyfriend to find their opinions and preferences. The survey requires the person taking it to rate how elaborate they think the art on an account is on a scale of 1 to 10, and requires the person taking it to rate how much they like the art on an account on a scale of 1 to 10. The answers I gleaned varied immensely. Each of the subjects had different ideals and points of view. Each of our preferences were very different. For example I was a big fan of eugene.shadko and his art. I thought it was plain but very dramatic and interesting. However my grandmother and my boyfriend were not so impressed with his work. The reason I wanted to conduct the survey was so that I could understand how random people who are not invested in art viewed the accounts that I chose. I expected the results to be more or less the same, but each of us had very different choices. 

Problems

There were quite a few problems I ran into when trying to conduct research on my topic. I expected this to be a very smooth process, but the amount of effort I have put into this is more than I bargained for. That does not mean I did not enjoy doing this, it just means that I had quite a few bumps that I was not expecting. The first bump, I already spoke about. This was finding the accounts that I would be using. I thought it would be simple to search specific words and use the results to find the accounts, but searching on Instagram gives you accounts with exactly those words. So when I looked up line art, I got very low profile accounts that had no likes or followers. This was not beneficial to my research because nobody sees these pages. There are no preferences or opinions for these pages. I knew I needed decently popular accounts, like accounts with 500 or more followers. This would give me more data to use and to research with, therefore making my results for this project much more accurate. I had to rearrange my plan a bit, and I learned that using hashtags to find my accounts was a much easier and foolproof method. At first, I tried to use hashtags like “#elaborateoilart” or “#simplelineart” to try to find good in specific popular accounts. The results showed me that this was a very stupid idea. I got hashtags that were in one or two posts, so I had to simplify my hashtags. “#lineart” and “#oilpainting” seemed to do the trick. These hashtags gave me results with millions of posts. All I had to do from there was choose five accounts for each hashtag. To keep personal bias out of my research, I used and followed the first five accounts that popped up. Getting over this hiccup was pretty easy, but there were two other main issues that hindered my research. My big concern lies with the fact that some of the accounts that I followed had so many followers that Instagram just used “k” for “thousand”. This prevented me from getting precise numbers when calculating the average number of followers for an account. It really sucks that Instagram does not give me any exact numbers, but I still did the research regardless. In the long run, it wouldn’t have changed much. There is another problem I had while calculating the average number of likes and comments. My method for getting a average number of likes and comments was to use the most recent 10 posts from each account to gather data. The problem arose when I realized that a few of the posts were either repeated on each account, or there was no art at all on a post. To be more specific, one Instagram page had a post that was just a picture of a hand with paint on it. It would have no Real feedback from real people. And it probably had less likes than their actual art. I tried to come up with an idea that would exclude these dud posts, but I ended up using them anyways because I wanted my method for every account to be the same. If I had excluded these posts, I wouldn’t be able to say that I used the most recent 10 posts from an account. My method would have been a lot more complicated and inaccurate if I tried to exclude these posts. There was also a time at the beginning of this assignment when I thought that I could include Pinterest as well as Instagram in my research. I thought that since Instagram and Pinterest are both ways to express aesthetics, that they would both be beneficial to my findings. What I didn’t account for was that Pinterest is more erratic and unpredictable than Instagram. Instagram is much easier to use because of the similarity to other social media platforms. Pinterest shows you things that the algorithm thinks you’d like. It still gives you feed from accounts you follow, but the randomness of it is hard to work with. My plan for Pinterest was to find popular boards and investigate their popularity, but I realized that I would probably have to make a new account if I wanted to get information without my opinion embedded in it. Instagram has been easy to work with, and although I have less information than I would if I had included Pinterest in my research, the process has probably been much easier because of my choices. Instagram has been easy to work with, and although I have less information than I would if I had included Pinterest in my research, the process has been much easier because of my choices. 

Findings and Data

So now for the moment of truth. I will start off by reviewing the numbers I calculated from likes and comments of the most recent 10 posts of each account. I will then review the average number of followers for each style. My method for calculating the average number of likes and follows was to make columns with each account's name at the top, then list the data from the most recent 10 posts, then average the numbers.

 eugene.shadko’s past ten posts had 1,179, 765, 894, 974, 1,009, 1,412, 993, 871, 979, and 1,198 likes; then 22, 9, 14, 11, 27, 36, 27, 14, 21, 24 comments. These added up to an average of 1,027 likes and 21 comments.

jeremysandersstudio had 82, 405, 369, 198, 255, 262, 527, 191, 340, 74 likes for his ten posts, and 10, 10, 7, 11, 12, 7, 4, 10, 5 and 0 comments. This totaled up to an average of 270 likes and 8 comments. This was much lower than I expected.

r.s.lana Had 1070, 1355, 981, 823, 898, 1025, 976, 1229, 854, and 549 likes, and 42, 72, 21, 17, 23, 44, 49, 89, 34, and 35 comments. She averaged two 976 likes and 43 comments.

christinelashleyart’s posts had 1078, 638, 909, 1079, 4084, 4377, 1441, 5014, 1706, and 1670 likes. She had 32, 93, 39, 23, 163, 57, 41, 101, 67, 61 comments. These averaged to 2200 likes and 68 comments. She had the most popularity out of the oil painters.

leecraigmile Had 284, 501, 347, 354, 648, 198, 220, 497, 517, 330 likes. He had 3, 5, 13, 20, 13, 6, 6, 8, 19, and 12 comments. This averaged to be 390 likes and 11 comments.

Now moving on to our line artists. 

ellem.art had 422, 291, 225, 335, 334, 271, 231, 424, 316 and 347 likes, and 25, 32, 25, 33, 28, 36, 22, 25, 22 and 43 comments. These totaled up to an average of 320 likes and 29 comments.

flowsoftly’s posts had 42,000, 10,900, 9156, 10,400, 16,900, 7163, 13,400, 11,200, 16,000 709,346 likes. This artist had 283, 43, 21, 90, 66, 23, 39, 43, 83 and 28 comments. The average for likes and comments for this artist was 10,937 likes and 72 comments.

onlinesketching had 300, 253, 163, 175, 237, 135, 169, 199, 291 and 135 likes. This account had 30, eight, 28, eight, 26, nine, 16, 25, 28 and 29 comments. This average totaled up to be 206 likes and 21 comments.

alicelovesdrawing’s ten posts had 39,100, 43,400, 28,500, 37,700, 42,100, 29,500, 62,300, 45,100, 27,900 and 32,900 likes. The comments for this page were 362, 333, 399, 380, 298, 188, 327, 380, 206 and 365 comments. This artist had the most likes and comments out of the rest of the line artists. She had an average total of 38,850 likes and 324 comments. 

withoneline Had 25,800, 2808, 8674, 4907, 2662, 15,800, 9129, 1124, 40,800, and 2656 likes. He had 67, 55, 116, 123, 57, 50, 123, 20, 58 and 24 comments. His average came out to be 11,436 likes and 69 comments.

As you can see some of the most popular pages had likes that were not exact. An example of this is flowsoftly, with their first post out of the 10 having 42,000 likes. This happened a few more times with other artists as well. It once again prevented me from getting exact averages and numbers, but I still collected the data and used it for my research. 

After gathering all of this data and all of these averages, I used each average of likes from the oil painters, and each average of likes from the line artists and made an average out of those averages. I did the same thing with the number of comments. Can I get a drumroll?

After adding up the averages of the oil painters' likes and comments, I calculated that the average numbers for this art style is 973 likes and 30 comments. Truthfully this is far lower than I expected, I don’t know why I thought there would be more popularity, the numbers were right in my face. But this is what meticulous planning and data gathering gives you. This is the truth.

And after adding up the averages of the line artists likes and comments, I calculated that the average numbers for this art style is 12,350 likes and 103 comments. Line artists won outright. I really did not expect this.

The line art style won in the follower competition, too. 

eugene.shadko had 9453 followers, jeremysandersstudio had 4189 followers, r.s.lana had 8329 followers, christinelashleyart had 11,700 followers, and leecraigmile had 2187 followers.

The average amount of followers for the oil painting style averaged up to be 7172 followers.

ellem.art had 1158 followers, flowsoftly had 423,000 followers, onlinesketching had 831 followers, alicelovesdrawing had 560,000 followers, and withoneline had 88,000 followers.

This made the average number of followers for the line art style 214,598 followers.

So that covers the data from my research about the popularity of the accounts, but I still want to talk about the first impressions of these accounts to people who are not art connoisseurs. I am going to add in my survey results for comparison to my subjects results. The survey had two questions asking the subject to rate each account on a scale of 1 to 10. The first question was, “How elaborate is this art?” the second was, “How much do you like this art?”. I conducted the survey on myself before I researched all of the numbers and averages of the accounts, and my expectations were that the oil style was more favorable and would be more popular. I was obviously wrong, but here’s the data from my survey. 

When rating eugene.shadko’s art, I gave him a rating of five for being elaborate, and I gave him an eight for how much I liked his art. His art was not very complicated at all, but for some reason I liked it a lot. For jeremysandersstudio, I rated his Art a nine for being elaborate, and a six out of personal preference. His art was very colorful and extravagant, but it was repetitive and boring to me. For r.s.lana, I rated the art a seven for being elaborate and another seven for its likability. This art was not extremely complicated, and for some reason I didn’t like it a lot. When rating christinelashleyart’s art, I gave her a nine for being elaborate and a seven for how much I liked it. Her art was very beautiful and elaborate, but it was sort of basic to me. I gave leecraigmile A 10 for being elaborate, and an eight for personal preference. His art was very very detailed and insanely accurate for his subjects, and I actually admired it. 

Now for the line art. When rating ellem.art, shit I gave her a three for being elaborate, and a five for personal preference. Honestly I did not like the art, it was boring and really easy to make. Anybody could make that. I gave flowsoftly A four for being elaborate, and an eight for likability. It did not look complicated. It was probably made with one line, but the style reminded me of Egon Shiele, so I liked it a lot. onlinesketching got a five from me for being elaborate, but a two for how much I liked the art. This art looked like a coloring page. It was very basic and obnoxious looking. I gave alicelovesdrawing A seven for being elaborate, and a five for personal preference. Her art was just flowers, which were very pretty, but anybody can draw flowers. Finally, withoneline received a six from me for being elaborate, and a five for likability. His art was somewhat complicated, but his style was very generic to me.

My first subject gave eugene.shadko a four for being elaborate and a four for likability. She gave jeremysandersstudio A ten for being elaborate, and an eight for likability. She gave r.s.lana a seven for being elaborate, and a four for personal preference. She gave christinelashleyart a ten for being elaborate and a nine for likability. She gave leecraigmile a ten for being elaborate, and a seven for personal preference. She gave ellem.art a six for being elaborate, and a five for likability. She gave flowsoftly an eight for being elaborate, and a five for personal preference. She gave onlinesketching A five for being elaborate, and a five for likability. She gave alicelovesdrawing an eight for being elaborate, and a seven for personal preference. And finally, she gave withoneline a seven for being elaborate, and a six for personal preference.

My next subject gave eugene.shadko and eight for being elaborate, and a nine for likability. He gave jeremysandersstudio A nine for being elaborate, and a six for likability. He gave r.s.lana a ten for being elaborate and another ten for personal preference. He gave christinelashleyart a ten for being elaborate and an eight for its likability. He gave leecraigmile A 10 for being elaborate, and a seven for personal preference. He gave ellem.art a six for being elaborate, and an eight out of personal preference. He gave flowsoftly and eight for being elaborate, and a nine for likability. He gave onlinesketching a nine for being elaborate, and a nine out of personal preference. He gave alicelovesdrawing A seven for being elaborate, and a seven again for likability. Finally, he gave withoneline is seven for being elaborate, and an eight for likability.

Analysis

Out of all of these judgments, I have found that each subject has a favorite art page. I know that my personal favorite was eugene.shadko’s art because of its dramatic yet simple nature. My first subject's favorite account was christinelashleyart’s page. I think she liked this one because it was very pleasing to look at. Finally, my second subject's favorite art page was r.s.lana’s account because of its bizarre style. One thing that we all had in common was that our favorite accounts were all oil painters accounts. I believe that we all admire this style for its complexity and beauty. Line art just can’t compare, it has no color, and no perspective or depth. For some reason though, it is the most popular style on Instagram when you compare it to oil painting. My theory behind this is that Instagram is geared towards the younger generation, and the younger generation has a more minimalist style preference when it comes to art. Older people, and people who appreciate art admire it for its complexity, while modern generations like art for its simplicity and gestured style. If this same style as research was conducted on a platform like Facebook, I feel that the results would vary by tremendous amounts. Facebook appeals to the older generation more than the younger generation. This is simply because it has been around longer than other forms of social media like Instagram. Considering this idea, if this data was taken from Facebook I believe that the oil painting style would have more popularity then the line art. We also have to consider the idea that when Art is posted on Facebook it is admired more because lots of Facebook posts are just words. Art is celebrating more on Facebook because pictures are more rare. Facebook is more for sharing opinions; not art. Since there are more older generations on Facebook, and since oil paintings are considered a more traditional style, I think that the oil paintings would gain much more popularity than line art. If line art was shared on Facebook, the older generation may not admire it because it is new and not what people are used to. Overall, the answer to the question, “Which style of art will outweigh the other in popularity on Instagram? Elaborate oils, or line art?” The answer to that question is line art. The style of line art has an average of 207,426 more followers than elaborate oils. Line art has an average of 11,377 more likes than elaborate oil’s. Line art has an average of 73 more comments than elaborate oil art. I was not expecting this outcome at all, but sometimes you need to expect the unexpected.

Conclusion

So what can we conclude from this? Well, we know that line art has a high popularity rate on Instagram. This probably means that there are a lot of people from younger generations on Instagram who admire simple art. I think this could possibly mean that we are entering a new era of art that fits within society’s new perspectives. These are modern times, minimalism and simplicity are very big trends when it comes to art and various other things in this new age. I personally find it a bit disappointing that there is less appreciation for complex and colorful oil pieces, but things change, and maybe it is not a bad idea to open one’s mind to new trends and ideals.

 Data from research

The hashtags used

Here’s the link to my instagram art page that I used. 

And finally, here are all the accounts i used to collect my data. We’ll just do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.