I agree with this. It’s the artists, not necessarily the “style” itself. Basically the fundamentals of visual language are what’s hard to master, just like writing beautiful poetry requires mastery of a written/spoken language. Artists that have spent the time and put enough thought and practice into creating their own unique voice will be difficult to replicate.
Some modern artists I can think off of the top of my head:
- Piotr Jabłoński’s art for the Dishonored series
- Laurel Austin and Wei Wang’s art that created the modern Blizzard look.
- Disney Studios’ Nine Old Men.
- Craig Mullins the “grandfather” of digital painting.
- Traditional painters like Arthur Gain, Richard Schmid, Ruo Li, Mark Boedges, and on and on.
I ran into a guy from high school and it turns out he worked for Microsoft back in the Windows Mobile days. He said that changing even a single button on a submenu would take six months of meetings, and if it involved other departments they would actively sabotage any progress due to the way MS internally made departments compete, so you could basically forget it. He said they literally backdoored software so they could sidestep other departments to get features in.
I think about that a lot.