Art Evolution/Playing With

Basic Trope: The art quality improves 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. Some time later, the art is of Norman Rockwell quality.
• Justified: The webcomic is about an universe still being under construction by a god; with time, the universe looks better and better.
• 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 talented friend.
• Double Subverted: But when Bob returns to his webcomic, it turns out he learned to draw better during the holiday.
• Parodied:
  • Late in the comic, 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.
• 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.
• Reconstructed: Bob finds an art style for himself that looks nice, yet is also not too hard to draw.
• Zig Zagged: The art quality keeps going up and down.
• 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.
• Lampshaded: "Remember when we used to look completely different and disproportional?"
• 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.
• 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."
• 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 Bob and Alice have turned into the most realistic people in the comic! GET 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.

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