Creating a personal art style

RIGHTO, some of you were OK with me doing this when I asked so here it is. A little art style guide/tutorial. This is how I do it, I’m not saying this is the best or only way. So here we go.

 General Basics 

• Try ALL the things

Basically the first thing my art teachers taught me was to try out as many techniques as possible. Mix everything with everything and try anything at least once. If it turns out you don’t like it, you lost nothing but at least now you know it doesn’t work. But there is a chance that what you try turns out to be something you really do like, and that’s awesome. But again, you’ll never know if you don’t try. Make collages, paint an oil painting and mix it with crayons, paint with coffee or tree bark, etc. Even if you think “no, this’ll never work”, do it anyway. That way you can develop skills that can be used for a style. Remember, your art style is not just the way you draw.  

• Get inspired from things you wouldn’t normally do

Listen to a music genre you usually never listen to. Join a new art sharing website, make a blog (hehe), take a walk down a street you usually never walk trough, or try new drawing/painting software . It sounds cliche but you can get inspiration from the strangest things. This is especially potent if you feel like you’ve burnt out on your own art, which often seems like a big problem with young artists. Stagnation and blandness are an arists’s biggest enemies.   

• Don’t get discouraged too quickly

Developing a style that is really yours takes a looooooong ass time. Basically from the moment your first decide you like putting a pencil to paper until the moment you don’t want to anymore, your style is being developed. That means you will go trough a lot of different styles before you really settle on one that you would like to expand on. And that’s totally fine. It’s also fine to have a lot of different styles or one that slightly resembles another artist. And also keep in mind of course that with some people it’s easier to find an art style than for others. It sucks but that’s how it is.  

• Find what you like and learn from it

I know this one seems kind of like given but I notice that often artists are afraid to do this because they are afraid of judgement, particularly being judged of copying another artists’s style. And let me tell you now, short from actually tracing or copying every detail of some other artists’s style, you’re not doing anything wrong. In fact that second one isn’t really wrong either, it just often completely halts your growth as an artist.

But there is absolutely nothing wrong with looking at the works of your favorite artists and taking inspiration from it. For example, you’re not satisfied with how you draw noses, you just hate it. Well, look at how your favorites draw their noses, try some of them out, tweak them a little to your liking. And again, further down the road you will draw noses in a way that is completely yours because you keep evolving. Or you should, anyway. Because you will change during the years, your tastes will change, your emotional state may change, and all of it will influence your style.

• Color, composition and anatomy

OK, this may seem a bit boring to some of you. But color and composition can be very important in developing your style. Because it’s not just the way you draw, but how you execute your piece of art that is important.

Experiment with lots of colors, use a color you’d normally never dream of using in combination with others. Try gray scale or throw all the colors together. Drawing inspiration from other artists may again work here, because maybe some of them will use combinations you’d never have thought of. I personally also find color palettes very useful, there are a bunch of different tumblrs that provide those if you need them.

I don’t feel like I’m good enough to really explain color theory but the basics are very important while you’re experimenting. There are some really good tutorials floating around just like here and here.

Another thing that is important in a style is composition, the way everything in your drawing or painting is placed on the paper/canvas/etc.

Because just drawing your characters only full body, facing one way all the time gets boring really fast. With the exception of drawing references or designing a character of course. A good composition can make a drawing with a lot going on in it feel organised or a very bare bones one feel balanced.

Again, experimentation is key here. Something that I sometimes do is I draw my character in a rather basic pose and then mess around with the crop tool, cutting of parts and turning them sideways or even upside down, just to see how it would work. There are again a lot of in-depth tutorials on deviantart and the like if you want a more elaborate explanation.

OK, something that can get on my nerves is a drawing with terrible anatomy being defended as “but it’s my style”.

You need to learn the rules before you bend them. Now I don’t mean you need to study anatomy to the smallest detail (unless that’s your thing), but some basics are necessary. After that you can mess around all you want, but some knowledge can help make your extreme style more “believable” even if it completely bendy. Unless you’re into cubism or you’re Jackson Pollock or Rothko or something. In that case I’ve got nothing.

 Personally 

Right,now with all those points in mind. How I got to my own style.

In high school, we got an assignment to design a minimalist poster with Illustrator. And so I found out that I had the most fun with these big areas of color without any lines, and the more simplistic, the better. I also had a lot of fun with cross-hatching and ink, and even though I don’t use ink a lot anymore these days, the cross-hatching has stayed.

I get a loooooot of inspiration from music, like lots. Preferably music without lyrics, like soundtracks. Putting the mood of a song into a pose it one of my favorite things to do. And so when I’m out of inspiration, I like looking up new bands or downloading a soundtracks for a video game or movie I don’t have yet. For me, that almost always does the trick.

Luckily I had great art teachers that taught me that you should always be proud of your art without being arrogant. Liking your own art isn’t a bad thing, just don’t take it too far. So while I did get discouraged, a lot, you need to continue drawing.. And when I get discouraged now, just looking at other people’s work cheers me up. In that aspect I’m lucky.

I love other people’s art, adore it even. So my inspiration comes from all over the place basically.

Some examples are, here, here, here and here.

I got lucky that I got life drawing in high school, I complained about it at the time because I was terrible at it, and I still am. But now I’m grateful I know some basics. Drawing in great detail still isn’t my forte, in fact I believe it looks rather bland if it isn’t in color. So there’s that.

Colors-wise I swear by color palettes. I have a whole folder full of them, most of the time I end up changing or adding colors, but still. It’s so great.

RIGHT, so that’s it. I hope it was somewhat helpful. And again, this is my take on all of it, I’m not saying it’s the best or only way. Thanks for letting me ramble on and if you actually read the whole ting, I tip my hat to you.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask!

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