Basic Trope: The art quality improves or otherwise changes during the work's run.
- Straight: Bob's webcomic starts off as amateurish pencil sketches, but a year later looks like something by a professional cartoonist.
- Exaggerated: Bob's webcomic starts as a bunch of scribblings in MS Paint reminiscent of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. Some time later, the art is of Norman Rockwell quality.
- Downplayed: Bob's skills improve... but not by much.
- Justified:
- The webcomic is about a universe still being under construction by a god; with time, the universe looks better and better.
- A redesigned character in the webcomic just grew older between strips.
- Inverted: The art quality actually declines over time.
- Subverted: The art quality gets better... but it's just because Bob took a holiday break and the webcomic is currently being drawn by his more talented friend, Alice.
- Double Subverted: But when Bob returns to his webcomic, it turns out he learned to draw better during the holiday.
- Parodied:
- The characters travel back in time to the beginning of the webcomic and end up in a crudely drawn world. They stand out so much that the locals revere them as gods.
- The characters go back in time hundreds of years before the beginning of the webcomic, and end up in a world of primitive stick figures drawn in MS Paint.
- Late in the comic, the characters notice something that was supposedly in sight all the time, but the crude art made it hard to make out before.
- Zig Zagged: The art style shifts back and forth between the old style and the new style.
- Averted: The art in Bob's webcomic doesn't change much.
- Enforced:
- As Bob draws several pages each week, he naturally becomes better at drawing from all the training.
- Bob's been criticised for poor artwork, so he set out to improve his drawing skills.
- For a specific work, the medium is different, which requires the style to change to fit the setting. At least some of the changes stick even after the medium shifts back.
- Lampshaded:
- "Remember when we used to look completely different and disproportional?"
- "Man, that one month of online art classes at Chillchair really paid off!"
- Invoked:
- Bob treats his webcomic mainly as a means to practice drawing.
- In-universe: the characters cannot read a blurry clue, so they wait until the art gets more detailed so that they can make out what it says.
- Exploited: A fan of Bob mocks his art style for being terrible,Bob is then motivated just to spite the fan.
- Defied: Bob is aiming for Stylistic Suck and tries to make sure that the art doesn't get too good.
- Discussed: "I just wonder how are we all going to look in a few months, after the next mysterious Visual Upgrade event hits."
- Conversed: "This webcomic may look bad, but the art is gonna get better if it is updated so frequently."
- Deconstructed:
- Bob invests so much effort into his art that the storytelling suffers, and eventually Bob has to quit the comic altogether because he is such a perfectionist that drawing each episode takes too much time.
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks!
- Reconstructed: Bob finds an art style for himself that looks nice, yet is also not too hard to draw.
- Played For Laughs: "I've been in this comic for ten years, and I still look like a stick figure drawn by a four-year-old while everyone else has turned into the most realistic people in comic history! GIVE ME SOME ART EVOLUTION, YOU IDIOT ARTIST!"
- Played For Drama: A character's wife ceases to love him after Art Evolution makes it clear that he's ugly as sin.
Back to Art Evolution.
