Style

Is it something you can just change?

I want to talk about style. It’s a controversial one this. Spend five minutes on You Tube and you’ll find hundreds of videos telling you how to find your style. At the same time, there are an awful lot of artists, illustrators and art directors whose hackles rise at the mention of the word.

I have a friend, who doesn’t actually work as an artist, but she does draw (better than me), and she berates me whenever I talk about developing or changing my style. She believes artists put too much emphasis on style and should just draw, without analysing it. However, many people making a living from illustration would argue that a consistent and recognisable style is essential to growing and maintaining a loyal audience and is important in gaining commissioned work. Art directors and clients like to know what they’ll get from you when they employ your services. Of course there are exceptions. There are some amazing and successful illustrators whose work is unrecognisable from one project to the next.

The Accidental Expert

springs to mind.

The evolution of the squirrel - or my style of squirrel at least

But you know what, that friend of mine does have a style. And it’s unique to her. I can recognise her drawings immediately, just as I recognise her handwriting on an envelope at Christmas (and not just because she is one of the few friends I have who still sends Christmas cards). Her style is the culmination of the way she always draws faces, the materials she likes to use, the way she holds them in her hand, the line weight she favours, her go to colours, her sense of humour, the way the world looks to her and the subjects she likes to draw. That’s essentially what style is. It’s an expression of our thoughts and experiences, our artistic voice or visual language. And my friend is right, you can’t force or contrive those things. You just have to draw and see what comes out.

If that’s the case, how can you ever find your style? Or find a new style in my case. Much of what goes into forming our artistic voice is subconscious, or at least, not up for debate. I draw animals because I love animals. I know a lot about animals and it’s never really occurred to me to draw anything else. But when I first started taking art seriously again in my thirties, all that other stuff was up for grabs. I didn’t know what materials I would enjoy using, or how I would use them. I hadn’t stumbled upon those three colours I would go back to again and again, or the way I liked to compose elements on a page. So you work at these things, you draw. You practice and you keep practicing and eventually things start to slot into place until, at some point, you can look at your work and say ‘There is a recognisable style here and I like it.’

At that point, have you found your style? Yes, well, maybe. But it’s not the end point. Our skills improve, our interests shift, and our style, or our artistic voice, constantly evolves. Sometimes little by little, sometimes drastically as we turn our back on our tried and tested materials in favour of something completely new. So when I talk in this newsletter about finding my new style, it comes with the massive caveat that I know I can’t force that change and that this new style will itself continue to change. How, then, will I know when I get there? Maybe I won’t, but hopefully I’ll know when I’m on the right track.

I’ve mentioned before, my brain is a chaotic place. For me working in a particular and consistent way is about bringing some sort of order to that chaos. Without clear focus, I quickly become overwhelmed and when that happens nothing gets done. Or I find myself putting all my time and energy into the wrong things. A couple of years ago, I became so overwhelmed by my illustration work, I wrote an entire 85,000 word novel. But that’s a story for another day.