I’ve been exploring art for the past 4 years, just trying to see what is best for nsfw games as my focus, considering factors such as what tends to look good, how easy is it to make art on demand and in volume, as wel how art can be used in games and game mechanics, and this is what I can differentiate.
I find that art breaks down into two different questions:
realistic vs stylized
2d vs 2.5d (aka 3d effects via advance 2d techniques) vs true 3d.
Stylized art such as exaggerated female bodies, and other features (faces, anime style, hands, etc) takes advantage of various psycological effects to make the art very appealing, often better than real life (such as exagerated female features ;D), which often has many other benifits. Effects such as empasizing character personalities can lead to better story telling and user experience. But it takes a lot of experience to know what you can do and what works when. One of the great advantages is that simplification here is a very powerfull skill that can be leveraged benificially here.
Realistic art is both impressive and can make things intuitive to understand what is going on. The issue is the uncanny valley. Simply, the more realistic you try to be, the less room you have for failure to be acceptable. Trying to be realistic means you can’t be unrealistic, so you fix errors, as you do so, with out errors your work starts to look more realistic, but then the more realistic, the more you are forced to be even more realistic, and any errors left over start to look worse and worse, it is like a run away reaction. Trying to stop being realistic, which is instictual and intuitive to us humans, is a hard habit to break and is why stylization, exageration and simplification takes practice and skill. A lot less bang for the buck but people do apreaciate the work more so than when compaired to stylized works.
2d vs 3d,
3d is one major step towards realistic, making it harder to go with a stylized style (3d models look a lot uglier when you are working on them and making them vs when you actually show them off), and why 3d tends to lean towards realistic styles. 3d takes a lot of prep work but afterwards to make assets, dark work, but once you have assets, at least for me, I find the work to make the actually final assets (images and animations) to be a lot of fun and easy and able to make lot of stuff fast when compared to 2d. Trying to use 3d assets in a 3d engine however is soaked with techinicalities, and prerendered has its many benifits and shortcommings.
2d is quick to put together, but sometimes you don’t know how good a piece will look until near the end, making it hard to catch flaws. For every final asset (one single image) it takes time since you have to start from raw most of the time.
2.5d tries to enhance 2d artwork using various tricks (search live2d for a good example). Or / And tries to gain many of the advantages of 3d but for 2d artwork. such as making character rigs so you can easily animate characters for animations, easy posing, or animating in game.
pixel art, if stylized takes knowledge of psycological effects and rhetorical theory, pixel art turns that to 11. just thought I’d add the note that pixel art looks simple, but is the hardest thing I have ever tried to get good at.