Why are modern artists able to draw hyper-realistic art using just a pen/pencil, but artists from 100+ years ago weren’t able to?

Question

Edit: In regards to what I mean by hyper-realistic, I’m referring to artwork seen here: Pics

these are almost photograph quality.

In: 0

Answer 1

Learning various techniques wasn’t as easy as it is today with the internet. Basically if you couldn’t make it into an art school you pretty much had to either find a tutor or invent everything from scratch. Today you can look up 10,000 how to videos on YouTube and other sources that break down effective techniques for making the kind of art you describe.