How to Discover Your Personal Art Style: It's Easier Thank You Think
It can be difficult to understand one's own art style as we begin to dig deeper into who we are as artists, but everyone has a personal style, whether they are aware of it yet or not. Each decision you make from the moment you pick up your art-creating implement (pen, pencil, chalk, brush, etc.) to the time when you finish contributes to the style of your final piece of work.
If you are interested in a version of this post with 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.
How to See Your Personal Art Style
Your art style is an accumulations of all the decisions you make (with or without realizing it) that can be seen consistently throughout your body of work. The first step in understanding your art style is to begin recognizing what design decisions you are making subconsciously in each of your pieces. We are going to start by building or gathering a portfolio of our work, analyze the work to identify style elements, and then begin making conscious decisions to influence the direction of our designs in the future.
Build a Portfolio
If you have a recent body of work that you want to analyze already created, gather those pieces in preparation for the next step. If you are lacking enough pieces to review, or would like to start fresh, then welcome to the "building a portfolio" phase!
The key to this phase is to create art, that's it. Create at least three pieces of art that you can look at side by side. You can use references or dry from life, but the main thing here is that we don't want to be thinking too hard about what our style is (yet). Let's save that for later and just enjoy the process of creating something new so we are able to get genuine content to review.
Analyze Your Work
Now that you have a few pieces completed and can view them together, it's time to start looking for the consistencies.
Did you use the same media for each piece?
Did you use certain brushes, pencils, or pens?
Do your lines tend to be thick or thin?
Do you round your shapes or have sharper edges?
Do you shade with blocks of color, hashing, or not at all?
Is your work more realistic or stylized? Are the proportions accurate or exaggerated?
You can ask yourself these types of questions for every aspect of your work until you feel like you have gotten a better understanding of the unintentional decisions you are making so that you can start being intentional about them in the future.
When drawing eyes, do they tend to be the same size and shape or are they dramatically large or vary from character to character?
Do you put details into hands and feet or simplify them?
Do you choose to work in monochromes or color?
Do Your Research
Whether you are struggling to see consistencies in your own work, or you are ready to begin growing your style, it is great to take a moment and do some research on artists who's work you admire in order to gather inspiration.
When looking at other artists, ask yourself the same questions you asked yourself about your work, but applied to theirs. What choices are they making that make it so when you see their work at a glance you know it has been created by them before reading the signature in the corner?
If you are unsure where to begin searching for inspiration, I recommend Instagram, Pinterest, and even cartoons on television. Take a show like Rick and Morty for instance. These characters are all designed with round or oval heads, circular eyes, simplified features, and relatively straight limbs. The colors are flat, meaning there are little to no highlights or shadows keeping the art simple and easy to create animations out of.
Make Conscious Adjustments
At this point, you have created a portfolio of work, analyzed your own work for consistent style choices, and studied other artists styles who inspire you. Now it is time to take this information you've gathered and put it into action. Consider something about your style that you would like to improve on and make the conscious decision in your next piece of work to do it differently.
Keep in mind here, you aren't trying to create a carbon-copy of someone else's work, but allowing the difference with their style and yours to inspire change for you. Maybe you want to modify the proportions of your characters to be more realistic or more cartoony. Maybe you want to experiment in a new media or color palette. Or maybe you like they they use thin lines when they're creating line art, and you want to try this in your next piece.
Also note that this part of the process is experimental and you might not like everything you create while testing new things, but that's absolutely okay! The key here is just to practice until you do find something you like that you want to add to your routine. Eventually with practice, that chance will become one of the more subconscious decisions you make when creating art.
Your Art Style is Always Evolving
Change is representative of growth and as you continue to create art, it is natural to see a change in your personal art style over time. This is even noticeable in famous shows television shows like Spongebob, Scooby Doo, and Pokemon and with historical artists like Jackson Pollock, Salvador Dali, and Pablo Picasso.
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