Developing An Art Style
It’s the question every new artist wants to know the answer to: how on earth do I develop my art style? Does it just come naturally? Is it something you ever really find?
The answer to these will be different for everyone, and while I’m still very much in the early stages of developing my own art style, I can certainly share what I’ve learned on my little art journey so far.
Firstly, if you feel like your art is a bit all over the place at the moment, you are not alone. Everyone spends time developing an art style, and some people never settle on anything concrete at all. That’s totally fine!
I think we put too much pressure on finding our art style and perfecting it, as if one day we’ll just land on it and be finished developing as an artist. This is obviously not how it works, my friends.
An art style is a combination of how you use lots of elements: colour, shape, subject matter, line, expression, and pretty much any art principle you can think of. The more consistently you use these principles, the more consistent your art will look.
If you don’t feel like your art is very consistent it doesn’t mean that it isn’t good just because it doesn’t all look the same. Your art is probably going to just naturally become more cohesive as a group as you find the elements that work for you and that you like using the most, so concern yourself more with growing and practising and less with whether other people think your art is consistent.
If for your own sake you want to settle your art into a style faster, try focussing on a similar subject matter every time, or simplify your colour palette. Keeping a key part of your art consistent will help tie all your drawings together while you figure out the rest.
I think a good art style is a balance of using trusted elements with a bit of experimenting with new ideas, because the end goal isn’t just to find an art style and stick with it. It should be to find what works for you, and then to always keep developing and looking for things you like better.
Identify the things you like about your art and what you’d like to experiment with. Do lots of practising and pay attention to what you learn along the way, and which parts of your experiments you definitely want to keep using.
In the short time that I’ve been illustrating daily, I’ve already seen a big change and development in my art style. That’s because I practise for hours a week and try new things, and some of those things I don’t like (and don’t use again), and some of them I do like (and I’ll keep using in my next drawings).
You can see below how my drawings started quite soft, shy and contained, and over time have expanded into bigger, bolder scenes with more elements and more interesting characters.
Like everything with art, growth is about practising. There aren’t any magic shortcuts, you just have to try things out for yourself and find what works for you.
If you want to see my art process (and watch it develop over time), then pop on over to YouTube to follow along with some of my drawings.
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