Learning how to make art is a long journey – you must develop technical skills and learn from the experts to have the tools to create. However, that isn’t the final step. Part of growing and developing as an artist is fostering the individual parts of your art that make it yours – your style.
What’s an Artistic Style?
Artistic style, put simply, is the thing that makes your art feel like it was made by you. Style is how you can tell that a painting was created by Van Gogh, or a novel was written by Stephen King.
Style is completely individual to you and your artistic process, and that means that there is no perfect five-step program to find it. Most artists don’t even know how they developed their style – it just comes naturally and feels right.
Analyzing Your Work for Style
While there’s no perfect way to find your artistic style, there are ways that you can look at work that you’ve already created to see if you can find elements of your style within it. Look for patterns in your work – are you partial to a particular type of line weight or texture? What types of color palettes are you drawn to? What phrases or words are you most likely to use in your poetry? Patterns are the foundation of your style – they’re things that look or feel good to you and that you’re likely to continue using.
Don’t worry if your style keeps changing – it’s part of your evolution as an artist. No one’s personality stays static forever, and the same is true for your style. As you develop your artistic techniques, interests, and patterns, you might find that your style shifts and changes. For some artists, it even changes with their mood or the setting that they were in when they created a work. It all comes down to what feels good to you.