Discussion: artistic style

[mekare]

So, I‘ve been looking at my art and was wondering how to develop a style. I experiment with different media which is fun but it always leads to such different-looking results. Which can also be fun but I think I want to try make my art more recognizably me, you know? So, seeing as several of you have a strong style, what did you do to develop it, did it happen by accident, did you make deliberate choices? Do you have artistic styles that inspire you or even artistic idols?

Should I focus on getting better at the basics like anatomy or backgrounds first? I really want to push my art skills this year but I’m wondering what direction would make sense to focus on. (Maybe not style at all? Maybe that’s more of a long term goal?)

Comments

[mific]

Hmmm. I used to have a definite style when I was doing digital works, but it’s a bit more varied with trad media - depends on the medium. Probably my gouache art has more of a sameness, partly as I love colour so I don’t often do straightforward drawings or monochrome works these days. I don’t really want a style, as after a lot of art in school, for years I did no art at all, then just digital art, and now I’m having such fun with traditional media again, I mainly want to experiment. For me it’s about rediscovering art later on, rather than having a lifetime in which to experiment and settle into a style of some sort. Maybe we should go through stages or periods rather than having a settled style, like Picasso’s blue period, or Monet’s detailed Paris café paintings compared to his later waterlilies!

[mekare]

>>I mainly want to experiment

Yep, that's what I like doing too.

>>Maybe we should go through stages or periods rather than having a settled style,

This approach is really helpful thank you :-)

[lynndyre]

I don't know exactly. In a sense I think people might develop different styles for different media, like having different handwriting styles. I know I still practice other people's styles especially with fanart for drawn or animated canons, but basic anatomy helps a lot. Backgrounds are hard, and a different set of stylistic things to work out.

On a different tangent, Kazuya Minekura is one of the artists I love the most for a strong style I absolutely can't match- some of her art seems like the individual aspects should be ugly but the full pictures are often amazingly beautiful.

[mekare]

Thank you for your thoughts. :-)

[alias_sqbr]

100% by accident, I just draw each individual picture until I think it looks good. Yet even when I try to make my art less recognisable for anonymous exchanges etc it is apparently very obviously by me.

[mekare]

>>Yet even when I try to make my art less recognisable for anonymous exchanges etc it is apparently very obviously by me.

Ha, that sounds interesting :-)

[alias_sqbr]

I saw other people do the "guess which fanfic is by me" game and thought it would be fun to play with my fanart. Once :)

[baycitybomber]

Something that could help is collecting lots of art you like in a folder and trying to find something the majority of them have in common. My style developped naturally over time but I definitely remember certain images/artists having a big influence on me. Also, "recognizable style" covers a lot of things you might not take into account at first - my friends tell me they instantly recognize my art because of my color choices, something I wouldn't have thought of before they pointed it out. The most important thing is to take it easy, it'll come sooner or later.

[mekare]

Yeah I think I have to be patient. Andas for collecting, I actually used to do that a lot years ago and then stopped somehow

[dirty_diana]

Learner artist who should not be giving advice, but I definitely have styles I gravitate towards and try to mimic a bit. In my case the media I use factors in too? Many people using pens and markers are doing similar things with them and if I look up how to draw x tutorials, it's likely to be on how to accomplish things in that general style.

[mekare]

Tutorials are a good idea. I just wish i was at the stage where I could confidently achieve the effects I want.

[dirty_diana]

Don't we all! Probably practice is the only key for that, aggravatingly enough. *is impatient*

[syntheid]

Basically style is just kind of an amalgamation of stuff you do or don't like doing and how you've stored the shorthands in your mental visual library.

If you draw a piece and you love how, say, a nose came out, analyze what you did and figure out how to consistently recreate it. Do it enough and that will become how you shorthand a nose, and then it'll be your nose-style. If you hate some aspect of drawing/painting, think about how you can avoid doing it and still create a finished piece. (e.g. For me, I struggle with finishing off rendering and detailing so I simply.. do not, a lot of the time, and I figure out ways to leave things sketchy or loose and still look 'finished'.)

Take things from other artists, haha. I mean like, remix it? But if you like how Artist X does hands, copy a page of their hands, learn what lines they put down to make it look right, and then the next time you want to draw a hand, that influence will be part of it. When we did gesture drawings in class, mine came out stiff and felt ugly to me, so I watched how my classmates did it and tried using some of their styles. Eventually all the different styles of theirs I tried became my own shorthand for gestures that's influenced-by but not exactly like any of theirs.

Relatedly, do gestures (or at least, very short studies, like 10 minutes or less). Gestures force you to take a very short amount of time to make something look recognizable so you end up simplifying lines/values to the bare minimum to be readable, which will help you figure out do you really like emphasizing curves or angles or actually your focus is the line of motion or you really want high contrast values etc. And it'll lead to those happy accidents where you realize you love drawing a particular kind of sketchy leaf or something that happened one time when you were trying to silhouette it.

tl;dr: Don't try to come up with an entire 'style' all at once, style develops out of a multitude of things, from what mediums you prefer, how detail-oriented you are, etc. And everyone's style is always evolving (if it isn't, the artist is no longer growing), albeit usually in subtle ways.

[mekare]

That's really helpful, thanks. And I have actually started gesture drawing to improve poses and not focus on details too much.