You've been drawing for quite a few years, you've mastered many levels of art, and you want to go onto the next step. No longer do profiles, hands, and torso lengths frighten you. No more does hair or eyes intimidate your skill. Classes have been had, Youtube tutorials have been watched, and you're ready to start it as a career. Starting to create an online presence and selling your art at galleries and on a website excites you.
But there's just one thing you're worried about, and that's your style.So many artists have their own technique and look to their art, but you feel that much of yours is justrandom inspirations with no rhyme or reason. Sure you can paint or sketch out an amazing piece, but you can't seem to find a correlation between that piece and all the others.
Photo by Grace Madeline Moser "Finding Your Art Style"
Now you're looking for a way to define your artistic touch. One of the first steps you can take is to gather all or most of your works, whether they're in a sketch book, or individual folders, and start to look through them. Review them once and take notes of similarities in each piece and try to find a pattern. Make sure to view each piece slowly, going back to others for reference. See if there are any similarities in eyes and how far apart they are, parallels between the height and width of the character's body, or even hair type and length.
Then once you've noticed and written down enough notes on the patters, start to practice using this style. It doesn't have to be a complete and perfected methodology and look, but you can start to piece together the different methods. All you need to do at this stage is see how it develops and takes on its own personality.
Next you want to go onto different social media websites such as Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, or DeviantArt. Find different artists that you're already following and look through their pieces and how they have a particular style. I never realized it until I went through different pieces by some of my favorite artists, that their characters had the same type of eyes and hair and body structure.
Then see how they capitalize off of it. Look to see if their is a recurring character and/or theme they put their character or characters in. People follow them because their art is steady, it's predictable, and people like that because they're comfortable with predictable. This is what you're going for when finding your own style.
Photo by Grace Madeline Moser "Looking at Art Styles from Other Artists"
Now when you start to feel comfortable and happy with your style, think about what type of genre it would fit into. If it's manga, then it has a Japanese feel, or if it's futuristic, it might fit in with SciFi art, or if it's old fashion it would go into the classical genre. Market your art as the theme you choose and you will be able to find a niche and fulfill many people's expectations.
It can be a big decision to start selling art and getting a viewing and audience. There is so much work involved in becoming recognized as an artist. But it can reap many rewards as it pushes you to find and create your own signature style. And when your signature style is recognized and admired, then you will know that all that hard work was worth your time.
