How I Discovered My Personal Art Style
Updated: Dec 18, 2022
I think a lot of self-discovering artists get held up by the need to understand their own art style at some point during their growth as an artist. If you have found yourself here because you have been dying to try and understand yourself and your personal art style, then hopefully I can help by explaining my journey and the processes I went through to discover my own personal art style.
If you are interested in the steps without the personal anecdotes and examples, you can see my other blog post here.
Use the outline below to jump to a later section in this article.
Although I have been drawing recreationally since I could pick up a pencil, and I have been working professionally as a graphic designer since 2015, so much of my experience was in the form of simple doodles, class projects, and heavily branded work assignments. It wasn’t until 2020 when I was laid off during COVID-19 that I suddenly found myself with a lot of free time on my hands and I wanted to use some of this time to figure out who I really was as an artist. This time, I could focus on creating art that was truly inspired by my own interests without the judgment of my teachers or the restrictions of a rubric and brand guidelines.
But where does one begin?
Start Creating Art. You Don’t Have to Like It.
The first phase of discovering your own art style is to create art–no strings attached. Draw your favorite subjects. It’s okay to draw from life and use references here or to go completely off the top of your head. The important thing is to create a few pieces of work to start building yourself a portfolio for our steps later.
Now, here’s the hard part. Create your sketch or piece of work without overthinking it, without over critiquing it, and without giving up halfway through just to move on to the next project because you don’t like what you see. Try to have fun with it and if you notice things about the piece of work that stand out to you, make a mental note of it or write your critique down and save it for later. We will be analyzing our own work in the next step, but we don’t want to get too focused on reflections yet because we don’t want these thoughts to interfere with the creation of our piece.
For myself, I dabbled in creating art traditionally in my sketchbook and digitally on my computer and iPad. I even took up a new medium and worked with gouache for the first time. You don’t have to do this if you know what media you are comfortable in, but for myself I found that I had similar techniques across all media that helped me hone in on my style.
Review Your Work
Here’s the thing: everybody has an art style–even you. Even your five-year-old cousin, or that kid who sat next to you in math class and doodled in the corner of their notebook. Your art style is determined by patterns in how you choose to create art. It might be hard to see at first while you are learning and constantly changing and improving your techniques, but some things will remain consistent across your work, and this is where your personal style comes on.
What are we looking for things including but not limited to:
How you choose to shade and highlight your work (blending, hatching, something else?)
Your preference towards realism versus exaggerate features
Using outlines, shadows, or some other method to create contrast with shapes
Preferring certain media or tools when creating art
How much contrast you use between shadows and highlights
How hard or light you press down with your pencils
Let’s break it down using some of my old work as an example:
Here are three pieces that use the same medium: gouache. For each of them I have a tendency to use outlines to help separate my shapes; I don’t rely solely on shading and highlights to create depth in my illustrations. I did use photos for reference but I chose to simplify the shapes and did not try for photo-realism. When picking colors, I try never to use black and prefer to use a blend of colors to make a dark shade of something in my piece to represent black. While sometimes I draw a background and other times I go for a solid color, I tend to play with boundaries and create a frame for my pieces within the art itself. All of these choices together reflect my personal style.
Let’s try again with a different type of work now. Here are some of the original character designs I created digitally using Adobe Photoshop on the computer and Procreate on my iPad.
These pieces all have the same type of subject: the human(ish) figure. All of them have a consistent use of outlines to hold the characters’ form, and a colored shape in the background to create depth without having to create a scene or environment. I threw down a base color and then drew in my shadows and highlights with soft, feathered brushes. My choice of lines, shading, brushes, and lack of background are all style choices that define my work.
Do Your Research
At each phase of my life, even those childhood drawings, I was proud of the work I was accomplishing, and you should be too! Regardless of if you feel like you have mastered the style you want or not, take a moment to pat yourself on the back for what got you to where you are today. That being said, I was not satisfied with my style just yet and it was time for me to do a little research on where I needed to change things up.
Breakdown Your Style
Now, it’s time to use those old pieces as a stepping stone to achieve something better. It’s time to rip them apart (hypothetically speaking!) What do you like about these pieces? After analyzing your style, what elements of your style would you like to maintain and what elements would you like to try and change? For myself, I wasn’t completely satisfied with using a solid color for the outlines. I was already experimenting with color and I decided to lean into this more until I found something that I really liked and wanted to incorporate into my artwork.
Find Inspiration
There are so many talented artists out there with uniquely recognizable art styles. You could find inspiration in tv shows like The Simpsons, Avatar: The Last Airbender, or Rick and Morty, or in popular comic strip art like Calvin and Hobbes, Catana Comics, and One of Those Days. I recommend scrolling through Pinterest and Instagram and following modern artists with styles and techniques that you like. What is it about these art styles that you like? Are there elements you dislike? What makes their work recognizable as “their work” when you see it at a quick glance?
Take it For a Test Run
So you have done your research on your own art style and you’ve found artists who inspire you to make improvements. The next step is to use that inspiration and try something new in your next piece of work. It’s okay if it doesn’t stick–the goal here is to make intentional decisions that change the way you make art. Some examples of things you can change could be how you incorporate a background or not, whether you ink your lines, what brushes or pencils you use to outline and color your work, or the choice not to use outlines at all.
I started this phase right as Animal Crossing: New Horizons had come out and a lot of my friends were playing as well as myself. I took on a personal project to draw some of my friends as if they were characters from the game. Below are some of my first few pieces.
You can see that I maintained a lot of elements from my own style but borrowed from Animal Crossing by creating cute little animal-inspired characters with large round heads and simplified bodies. I continued to use my color blocking and outlining techniques, but started playing with textured brushes, outline thickness, and grain.
The great thing about focusing on this subject matter was that it allowed me to knock out a lot of drawing in a short amount of time, and as you scroll through them you can see that even though they are similar, I am toying with levels of grain, thickness in strokes, choice of brushes, and preferences for colors. By the end of this, I started really liking how these characters were coming out and contemplating going back and redrawing the originals, which I consider a success. What this told me was that I was onto something and I was improving.
Here’s the main thing to remember though. When using references, especially other people’s art, make sure you stay true to yourself. At the end of the day, unless you are working on a group project that requires your work to look like everyone else’s, you want to retain your own spirit in your art.
Your Art Style is Always Evolving
As you continue to make art, your style will continue to evolve. It’s natural to continue to experiment, try new things, and learn each time you create something new. You can see this overtime in famous shows like Spongebob, Scooby Doo, and Pokemon. Or with historical artists like Jackson Pollock, Salvador Dali, and Pablo Picasso.
Hopefully my anecdotes and examples will help you to understand your style better. Just remember to be easy on yourself while you spend the time figuring it out and experimenting with new techniques. You don’t have to love every piece you do, but acknowledging each one as a learning experience will allow you to continue to grow. Cherish your flawed art as a reminder of where you have come from and keep your focus on continuing to do what you love.
You can see more examples of my art here and follow along with me on my art journey.
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