How to Develop Your Own Art Style?
Article at a glance:
- Developing your art style is a lifelong journey, it will keep evolving the more you grow as an artist, so don’t stress about “finding it” right away.
- You have to start somewhere, and breaking it down into simple steps makes the whole thing a lot less overwhelming.
- You don’t need to be an expert, this is one beginner talking to another, just sharing what actually helps.
Well, continuing with our series of articles to help new artists, I think this is a pretty relevant topic. Once again, I claim to be no expert. I am a beginner as well. Discovering your art style is kind of a lifelong thing. Your art style WILL change as you evolve as an artist overall. But here’s the thing: you have to start somewhere. So how do you decide what you want to do? So today, I want to guide you through how to develop your own art style.
And once again, I have broken the whole process down into some simple steps to make the whole thing easier on you.
Learn and Practice Anatomy
Once again, there is no escaping it. I am stuck on anatomy right now myself. Even if you want to draw anime art, knowledge of basic anatomy is necessary and goes a long way. But here’s the thing: as you practice anatomy and keep trying out different faces, postures, and things like that, you will start developing a better understanding of what type of art appeals to you. This will happen naturally as you draw more and more.
That in turn will make you more observant of how other artists draw certain body parts or how they proportion their drawings. And then
Consume More art
Once you develop that sense of what you like through practice, you will become a lot more observant of how other artists draw the same thing. So use that knowledge to pick out what you like from someone else’s art style. Maybe you really like how a certain artist draws eyes, but then you like someone else’s face shapes or body proportions more. Consume more and more art you like and observe what about that art appeals to you.
Try it out!
Well, once you’ve figured out things you like and what elements to combine, try it out. Practice that style. Experiment, play around, have fun. Maybe you will like the combination you came up with, maybe it will suck, but you will learn something either way, so don’t give up!
Repeat Steps 2 and 3
Once again, everything will boil down to practice. As you experiment and mess around, you will start to slowly but surely develop your own way of doing things. That is what you’re after. It will take time, it always does. But trust me, it will be fun. As I said, consume more art, try it out, and just have fun experimenting. Slowly but surely, you will develop something unique to yourself. Eventually, you will land on something you truly like.
And again, this is not a one-and-done type of thing; your art style WILL evolve over time as you practice more and more. Your art style grows with you, so even if you just start with imitatting some other artist, eventually your art will develop into something unique, slowly but surely.
That is all for now
Once again, remember that I am a fellow beginner as well. I am practicing anatomy myself, and I am likely to be here for a while lol. But I just want to encourage and help fellow newbie artists. We can never have enough artists around, especially in this day and age. With that said, though, I will take my leave here. See ya!
Also, check out my thoughts on Anime piracy here!
