Being a creative person is not easy. Having a mind that is continuously bombarded with unique and creative ideas and thoughts is draining. It’s difficult to stop one thought and start working on it. This is why every artist struggles to find their own unique style as a signature, because choosing a single art form and sticking to it sounds hard. As an artist, you want to be able to make anything and everything. As there are several forms of art, including Fine art, Performance art, architecture, filmmaking, sewing, and more. 

From painting landscapes to playing with watercolors or oils, making sculptures, abstract art, or do poetry, dance, sing, become a digital artist or even an architect or interior designer, as a creative spirit, the heart wants to try them all. In this article, we’re going to find out what an art style is, we will also help you find your own art style, and know why having an art style is important, and check out some common art styles.

Before we start, just keep in mind that as humans, whatever content we consume, our inspirations, our life experiences, everything has an effect on our subconscious mind which somehow translates into any art we make. 

The books you read, the TV shows and movies you watch, your taste, your knowledge, your favorite sports, emotional connections, your secret desires, everything you experience is present in your subconscious & breathes into your art involuntarily.

So whenever you create, or if you already have a lot of art created, take some time to deeply analyze what about your art connects with you authentically and describes you as YOU.

Why Is Having An Art Style Important?

But selecting your own art style is also important because it helps you stand out from the crowd and develop your own unique brand. Your signature art style can help people identify your work. It could be your color palette, mediums, technique, themes or anything else that makes your art define you and is exclusive. The art you create can be a reflection of your personality, your thoughts or philosophy, something that inspires you, or even something you want to raise a voice for or against. Your art basically describes you as a person and brings out your authentic self in some way or the other for your audience to see.

What Is An Art Style?

As we discussed, an art style makes you unique and helps your work stand out as a brand. It is a specific element that you incorporate into all your artwork as a signature and helps your audience identify it. Choosing an art style means sticking to one unique thing that is represented in each art piece of yours. It could be a color theme (pastels or vibrant colors), your paint medium (acrylics, oils or watercolors), type of art (abstract, landscapes, buildings, cityscapes, characters), your technique (soft blended brush strokes, short and rigid hard brush strokes, knife painting, sponge painting) or any other particular thing you like.

How To Find Your Art Style? 8 Rules That Work

Make A lot of Art

Someone has rightly said, practice makes a man perfect. The first step in finding out your own art style is to make a lot of art daily. Practice your favorite styles everyday and don’t restrict yourself in the beginning. Draw, sketch, paint whatever you enjoy the most, use the colors that attract you the most, use your favorite mediums and keep creating different pieces. Making art everyday will help you figure out what is it that keeps popping in every other art piece of yours.

And the best way to keep yourself motivated to make art everyday is to set aside a time each day to create art and then reward yourself for doing so. Also make the place where you create more accessible so there’s less resistance to creating art. For example, if you keep worrying about how you would have to wind everything up and clean the place after creating it, then you might just not get up from the couch. Arrange a dedicated space to create art, a little art studio, where you don’t have to worry about the mess after creating, just go  and start creating.

Collect Inspiration

Collect the works of artists that inspire you, study a large collection of a single artist so you know the similarities between each of their pieces. You can do this by researching online, reading art books, making Pinterest boards, reading articles or going to art galleries.Pick out your favorite artists and research more about their process, what they took inspiration from and their methods to create art. Make sure you collect work that is in some way similar to what you want to create. Study what techniques they have used in their artwork and ask yourself if you would like to create something similar or not.  

Analyze Your Art

After you’ve practiced making a lot of art, experienced different styles and collected your most favorite art inspiration, take a step back and have a long look at what you like about it (medium, colors, size, materials, type, textures, themes, techniques). Notice something that pops up on every painting you made or the inspo you collected. It could be a color theme, a technique, medium of paint or anything. These little details can help you figure out what you like and contribute to developing your own unique style.

Be Authentic To Yourself

Make art that brings you joy. The reason you chose art as a career is so you could express yourself freely and enjoy doing what you love. So each art piece that you create should bring you joy while you create it and not just the final results. The process should be as much fun as the finished product. And you can only achieve this by creating the kind of art that is always fun for you to create no matter how it ends up looking. It could be drawing characters, painting clouds with acrylics or seascapes with oils or anything you like

I personally love creating landscape paintings and can’t get enough of them or get tired of making them, at least for now. Maybe in 5 years I will switch to something else, but for now I'm good. And this is the beauty of art, you can explore as many forms of art as you want, because once an artist is always an artist. You just need to create what you intrinsically want to create and not just because everyone else is doing it or some form of art is popular these days. Yes, you can cash it for the time being if you want, but your art style reflects who you are as a person in some way or the other, that is what makes it unique. And you can only create such art when you are true to yourself.

Experiment With Different Styles

As we discussed earlier, trying out different styles before you stick to one is a must. It’s important to widen your perspective before you narrow it down to one style of art. Challenge yourself in the beginning to try out art styles you have never tried before. Maybe once you create something out of your comfort zone, you enjoy it. You never know, this new experiment could also lead to discovering your unique style. As artists we tend to stick to whatever comes naturally to us, but while being true to ourselves it’s important to get our hands dirty and explore all kinds of art styles as this may help us discover some hidden talents or new favorites.

Take It Slow

Be focused on creating and experimenting rather than being in a hurry to find your own art style. No need to give yourself strict deadlines as finding your styles requires time and everyone has different amounts of time available. Each artist’s timeline will differ, so just be focused and you’ll figure it out soon.

Challenge Yourself

In order to find your own art style, you need to set aside time each day to create art. Be regular with experimenting and creating by creating every day. You can’t figure out your style without putting in the work. Give yourself daily/weekly deadlines and do your best to achieve them. Join art challenges or groups to hold yourself accountable. Discipline is necessary to achieve anything in this world.

Maintain The Balance 

Your art style can evolve but don't switch too quickly. As humans we tend to get bored with what we’re doing after some time and novelty brings us joy, be it changing your art style. Pivoting your art style can also be beneficial if what you were working on earlier isnt working out for you. Maybe you loved creating those pieces but you’re unable to sell them. Changing your style a little bit can help your business as well as bring you a fresh perspective and joy of creating something new. 

For example, you loved painting seascapes but it was the reflections of the sunset that you loved the most about them. So you could experiment more with sunsets. But do keep in mind you should only change your style after you’ve made some mark with your old style, changing it too quickly won’t build a brand or help you get recognized for your work which is the sole purpose of having an art style in the beginning.

Questions To Ask Yourself In Finding Your Own Art Style

• Is your art realistic or more characterized and illustrative?

• What color palettes do you frequently use in your artwork?

• Are your paintings more detailed or simplified? 

• What's the complexity level of your artwork? 

• Is your background always plain white or do you like painted backgrounds?

• Do you add similar icons or elements to many of your paintings? 

• If you like texture, what technique do you frequently use? (drops, sponges, dry brush strokes, grains)

Some Common Art Styles

Impressionism: Artists use light and color to capture quick and beautiful moments in this type of art. Small dancing strokes of paint are used to make things look shimmering and alive.

Surrealism: This style awakens the dreams of the subconscious, Surrealism paints a world where reality and imagination come together. A mixture of strange and real painted as one.

Cubism: Fragmenting reality into a kaleidoscope of geometric forms, Cubism reassembles perceptions using shapes, revealing a multidimensional tapestry hidden within the mundane.

Abstract Expressionism: Anyone can find their own perspective and story in this style of art. Emotions are set free on the canvas, abstract expressionism is about artists describing how they feel through vibrant colors and brush strokes.

Pop Art: is making everyday objects look important. Like soup bowls and soda cans turned into bold statements.

Realism: Realism is recreating the world with precision, making you believe with intricate detail that you could touch the painting and breathe the air of its painted scenes.

Abstract: Abstract art transforms feelings into lines, shapes, and colors that resonate beyond the confines of the familiar.

Classical: Classical art pays homage to the human form and the divine, it shows ideals that are timeless and important.

I hope this guide will help you find your own art style, be it digital or traditional and motivate you to keep pushing yourself. The possibilities of creating art are endless, and anything mediocre to you could be highly valuable for someone else. So never underestimate your work and put it out there for all the art lovers.

Happy Creating!

FAQs

How to find your digital art style?

Ask yourself if you like drawing with a pencil, pen or like painting with a brush? Try out different styles and techniques and online softwares until you find something you enjoy creating, take inspiration from different digital artists and check one artist's work to find similarities in every piece.

How to find your art style for beginners?

Practice by making a lot of art everyday, try out different styles, mediums, sizes and techniques, know yourself and what you’re drawn towards and inspired from, gather inspiration from your favorite artists and whatever piece catches your eye, study the art you made and collected, look for clues that occur in each painting and start making more art consciously using the one or two elements in each piece.

How to find your drawing art style?

First step is to choose your subject matter, decide what you want to draw, then choose your medium (pen, graphite pencil, pastel pencils, charcoal pencil etc), next start copying work of your favorite artists, practice a lot, experiment with the different subjects, mediums and sizes and you’ll figure it out.

What are the different forms of art?

There are 7 main forms of art including, literature, cinema, theater, music, architecture, sculpture, and painting.