Freestyles
On finding your style as an artist/illustrator
I’ve been an artist for a generous handful of years now and only in the last few years of my career, have I finally developed a recognizable personal style that finally makes people say “oh yeah I recognized your art”. Underwhelming, but still the sweetest music to my ears after much struggle and strife. Finding an art-style takes time, development, trial and error and commitment. I can already feel you resisting this post- but trust me you’ll want to read through to the end because I’m going to share some hot tips to help you find your style and stay on track.
Will art school help me find my style?
I’ve always been an avid doodler, I can fill a page with colourful squiggles and decorative motifs like nobody’s business and I have a decent eye for colour-theory. Somehow my portfolio of manic scribbles got me accepted into Emily Carr University in Vancouver and OCADU here in Toronto. Being the small town girl I am, it was my dream to live in Toronto so I promptly enrolled at OCADU and that’s where I effortlessly I developed the illustration style you see now.
Just kidding, art school somehow made it more difficult to find my own style due to the inundation of assignments and pointless essays on existentialism getting in the way of actually taking the time to explore what I wanted my art to look like. My weird squiggles and chaotic doodling was doing me no favours when it came to following assignment guidelines on composition, subject matter, and conveying a message. I struggled through the first few years of University, handing in pieces that I hated, but: perfection is the enemy of done in these institutions so you better hand in whatever you come up with, even if it’s looking clunky and low-key kind of beat. Despite the rigidity of the university course-load, I was able to find time to experiment across media, from gouache, to watercolour, collage, polymer, digital, acrylic, textile, block-printing etc. however, I wasn’t sold on sticking with any of these techniques for 4 years.
Assignments: block printing, some type of impressionism painting, frottage, collage, acrylic semi-realism. Lots going on here but none of it cohesive.
I didn’t have a well-defined style going into OCAD and sometimes I wonder if that’s the secret sauce to success. So many of the top artists and illustrators in my program had a very developed personal style that was easily recognizable and I think that it earned them an advantage in their Thesis and in finding meaningful work after school. How did all of these talented people already know exactly what their art was going to look like and pull it off so effortlessly every time?
They must have been spies, planted there by OCAD to make it look more reputable (jk jk jk). By the time my Thesis came around 4 years deep into art school, I still had no idea what my illustration style was. I finished with a portfolio of strange images-separately they were strong pieces, with a defined and unique illustrative style applied to each of them, but together this amalgamation of illustrations looked like they had been done by a collective of artists and not just by me. Somehow I managed to graduate from OCADU in 2021 in the height of Covid lockdowns, with my weird portfolio of illustrations jankily-displayed in an online gallery that looked like it was slapped together by a highschool student. This experience was incredibly unfortunate and anticlimactic and did me absolutely no favours when it came to knowing how I wanted my art to show up in the world. (Don’t worry, I’ll be writing a whole blog post on OCADU later…)
SO! I took my little diploma and stuffed it away somewhere and continued on my journey to figure out just what the hell it is I’m trying to do. All that to say- art school isn’t always the best place to look when you’re trying to develop your personal style. Maybe look elsewhere before you dig yourself $40k worth of debt like I did :)
Thesis Illustrations: “History points to women as being the proprietors of herbal knowledge and the first ones to document and categorize herbs by their medicinal and toxic qualities. This ancestral knowledge lives on today through storytelling, mythology and communal practices. Herbal Heroines seeks to position women as the champions of their own lives, to gain autonomy and to help others.Themes explored in this series include: empowerment, feminism, autonomy, ancestral knowledge, education, re-writing women’s history, reclamation of lost knowledge, fighting against the patriarchy and capitalism, mythological stories and folklore.”
I loved my thesis topic, but there was a lot going on here stylistically, you can tell I wasn’t confident in picking a stylistic direction for my art.
Room for one more?
As I turned my back on art school forever and foraged deeper in my quest to find my style, I was aghast to see that people were already making the type of art that I wanted to make and had been doing so successfully and commercially for many years. It was all there on Pinterest and Instagram- all of the coolest work I’d ever seen, illustrated and out in the world, made by someone else’s hands. And not mine.
If this was the case, where did I fit in and how could I stand out among these legends who somehow went into MY brain and stole all of MY super unique and totally original thoughts and ideas? Did the world really need another illustrator drawing weird girls with flower-heads and creepy medieval botanical illustrations? Or more suns and moons with faces, black cats, tarot cards and affirmations? “What’s the point”, I lamented, as I stuffed my face with Oreos and went back to the drawing board. But just then, my HUMN-4002 Intro to Existentialism brain kicked in : What is the point of anything? Just DO. Do the thing and do it your way, stop overthinking it. No one can do it like you. No one has your mind, your hands, your dreams. Even if it’s the same recycled content and symbols, it’s original because you’re the one making it.
It’s so easy to feel discouraged when you see other artists already making the type of work you want to make. It can cause major mental roadblocks when you’re of the mindset that there isn’t space in the world for your art. Let me tell you something: There is always enough space for your art and your creative voice. We are not each other’s competition, but reflections of each other. Of course someone else out of the 10 billion of us had the same idea as you. If it feels like everything has been done before, that’s because it probably has been done, but not by you. So get to work because the world needs YOUR art.
Some works created during my time in school and after. I had something going here but couldn’t commit to the flower-headed women anymore after seeing so many artists doing the same thing.
Hoard inspiration.
Find what inspires you! Make an art-style mood-board with artists who are making the type of work you want to make, collect examples across mediums. If you’re an illustrator trying to achieve a painterly feel in your work, look at what the painters are doing. If you work digitally and struggle with composition, refer to your favourite film directors. Find elements within their work that inspire you, maybe it’s a texture they use, their use of coloured lines, the use of positive and negative space in a composition. Take some small elements from a large collection of diverse works and try it out.
It’s not about emulating another artist’s style, but appreciating their technique and trying to find a way to organically incorporate it into your own work that makes sense. There are so many amazing free resources online to help artists learn new techniques. In this age of information, there is almost no reason an artist shouldn’t be able to level-up their skills independently. The experts on Youtube University have taught me so much as an illustrator and websites like Skillshare and Domestika offer affordable courses to help any artist advance their practice, *not sponsored but maybe one day?
Just a handful of my many mood-boards I refer to when I’m feeling uninspired. Sometimes just looking at what someone else is doing will light a fire under my ass to make something, anything.
Try all the things!
As aforementioned in my art-school paragraph, I tried a little bit of everything on my way to finding my style, both in school and out of school. I didn’t limit myself to one medium or discipline. I had to get all of my pent-up creative energy out. I couldn’t call myself an illustrator because I wasn’t really “illustrating” in the traditional sense, I was just flopping around in my studio making a bunch of weird shit trying to find something that stuck. I loved the way that a grainy block-printing experiment looked when I didn’t apply even pressure to the print. I love the misty speckled effect created by aerosols, the flat but tactile application of gouache on 120lb watercolour paper. I messed around with polymer clay, with weaving and collage and how certain textures and materials reminded me of something else that I could try to achieve digitally. I drew a lot of women, a LOT of flowers, I tried cartooning and character design for a brief stint- and as I dabbled in different media and art styles, referred to my inspiration boards and pulled on whatever fleeting knowledge leftover from school that I hadn’t smoked out of my brain, I slowly started seeing my style come together. I had always wanted to create work that looked hand-rendered (as in not digital). I’ve always been a maximalist when it came to filling negative space, I love ornamentation, motifs, symbology, numerology and surrealism and I started finding a way to distill all of these separate ideas and practices into one cohesive style. I can proudly and confidently call myself an illustrator now, however, I cannot say I have it all figured out.
Recent Illustrations demonstrating some cohesion and heavy use of the symmetry tool in Procreate. 2023-2024
Where do you want your art to live?
Knowing how you want your art to show up in the world is an important thing to consider after you’ve found your signature style, actually, even before. This is a problem I am currently confronting myself. For a while I was happy making artwork that looked great on a screen or as small-scale prints. Now I’m beginning to question if this is really how I want my art to show up in public spaces. I’m moving away from digital illustration now that I am more confident in my style and hoping to complete some larger-scale paintings that I believe will make my work more impactful. There are so many avenues to pursue, from licensing, surface design, poster design, apparel, functional goods, prints, it’s hard to pick one, so I don’t. Now as I design, I try to be conscious about how my designs would look in many formats and this informs the overall composition, colour and the level of detail.
Variety is the spice of life.
Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that you need to have one style and stick with it to be successful. Finding an illustration style was important for me because I’m pursuing editorial illustration and sometimes my personal work isn’t always the right fit for a project, so it was good to have a portfolio that showed my clients the stylistic direction I would take. It would be blasphemous to tell an artist they can only do one thing for the rest of their lives, so I encourage you, if you’re anything like me and you like to dabble in everything, diversify your offerings. Your variety of styles is an asset. I paint realism pet-portraits in watercolour, I’ve done representational portraits for editorial projects, my murals look like something out of my sketchbooks and nothing like my finished illustrations- I am an art chameleon in that sense. I adapt my style to suit the project, but when I’m applying for jobs I make sure to send in a very refined and cohesive portfolio of images done in one medium. Don’t frighten the art-directors with a portfolio that makes them wonder if you have 58 different people living inside your brain. Save that for the fine art world.
Sketchbook Collage of cut-up works and studies 2024
One last word of wisdom and I’ll stfu. Finding your style takes time, it will always be changing as you carry on in life and art. Don’t rush it, people reinvent themselves in their 40’s, 50’s and 60’s, you have the time now to figure things out. New things will inspire you, your visual library will expand and you’ll grow stronger as an artist. Make room for the change and embrace the discomfort, the experimentation, the mistakes. Keep going. ILY.