How to find your art style FAST in 3 easy steps (yeah, really)

Most artists don't want you to know what I'm about to tell you about style, but I'm going to tell you anyway, what a lot of artists on YouTube never say about style is that there is a way to deliberately construct it. You can manufacture your style. You can teach yourself to paint the way you have always dreamt of, and there is a formula to do it that I'm going to be sharing with you in this video. What they always tell you here on YouTube is that your style is just a thing that is bestowed upon

you by the gods. And just like, uh, you know, it's like a holy gift or something, and you just have to just make a lot of art and it'll be gifted to you, and then you'll just have it. But that's not really how it works. Your style is the product of thousands of tiny little decisions that you make over the course of your art journey. And that's just the way that it is. But you can choose to make those decisions. You can put yourself in situations where you are forced to make that choice where yo

u teach yourself how to paint the way you've always dreamed. There's a formula to it. It's really not that hard just takes practice like anything else. And it takes deliberate practice. And the first step to this process is just figuring out what you want your art to look like. This sounds easy. Um, it can actually be quite difficult because there's often a difference of like the art that you like looking at and the art that you like making. So really try and take time to reflect on the differen

ce between the two, like what kind of art you actually enjoy making. And this is also something that you'll get more experience and more data on as you progress and your art career and your journey as an artist. But what I want you to do is to collect a bunch of pieces of art that you gravitate towards. I want you to branch out, find a ton of art that you like, all the stuff that you gravitate to. Don't hold yourself back just to go off, don't try to stick yourself into a box when it comes to su

bjects better or medium or style, just collect all of this stuff that you really love and gravitate toward the most. And if you want to, you can go the extra mile. You can go to an art museum near you. You can walk amongst the galleries and see what you're drawn toward the most. And just take some notes on it. Jot down the name of the piece and the artists. And when you get home, just go online and collect it into your visual library. Save it for safe keeping. And once you've collected all of th

is stuff, I want you to take the time and figure out what connects it all together. What is the through-line that you can draw between all of these pieces? One way to think about it is if you were a curator of a gallery and you had selected all of these pieces to be displayed in one exhibition, what would you title that exhibition? What would it be called? What would be theme of it be? How would you describe it in marketing materials. All of that kind of stuff . Just really take your time and fi

gure out what's actually drawing you to these works of art. Is lighting and color used creatively to tell a story, to convey a feeling, to inspire someone to convey a particular mood, or is it purely realistic? There's a lot of, um, just space here for interpretation. And just as an example, let's take a look at how I characterize all of the pieces of artwork that I collected. So I ended up collecting exactly 50 images on my Pinterest board over here, finding my art style and the immediate thing

that I noticed here. Is that there's this balance being struck between realism and abstraction. Like the line is kind of blurry and often on the spectrum, we're leaning more toward abstraction, at least when it comes to color, but not always like mark making rendering and composition. I pinned a lot more abstract pieces than I probably thought I would, which is a really interesting thing to know about myself and what I gravitate toward as a creator. But there's some pointillism and here there's

a few pieces by. Um, Caitlin rose. Who's one of my favorite abstract artists working today. She's just phenomenal. She has some really interesting stuff like with line and masking tape, like you see here, there's like this interplay between these harsh lines and all of these softer, more organic shapes that are being blended out. That is, I think really, really fascinating that I would love to emulate in my own work that I really gravitated toward. And then of course, We have really cool stuff

going on with lighting like this painting here by Danielle Volkov. I have no idea who that painter is. And again, with Henrik Uldalen I follow my Instagram and I have for a long time, but he does some really interesting stuff with like representation abstraction too. And so that's a clear theme that we see throughout all of this. Like the market-making again, organic shapes. This clearly to me, looks like, um, we're seeing the water reflected on the pond. It's another Katelyn rose piece. So it's

abstracted, but I can like, see like the Monet kind of inspiration or something here reaching more toward the representational side. We have artists like I did, I pan one of her things I thought I did. Oh, maybe I didn't. All right. Let's do that. I have. A print of this, and it's sort of like, it takes that little bit of like abstraction from the Kaitlyn rose piece and brings it into a new context and the landscape setting in the representational setting. And that's the kind of thing that I re

ally gravitate toward. And if you've taken a bunch of notes on how all the pieces of art you selected are connected, they have [ gibberish ] wow. And now that you've taken notes on how all of the pieces of art you collected are connected. That's a tongue twister. I want you to take all of these characteristics and make them into goals. Think about if you were creating a university course on like this movement or this collection of art, that exhibition that we mentioned earlier in the gallery exa

mple, how would you teach someone to paint like this what's the curriculum that you would follow? Like what would you learn in week A versus week B if you were teaching this style. And for most of you, the first steps of how to paint in this particular style is going to be drawing fundamentals, focusing on how to make something look like the way that it looks like, how to do representative artwork. And by the time that you've created this course curriculum, you're going to actually have an actio

nable plan for how to achieve your ideal style. And once you start working through the syllabus, I guess if we're still calling it. You're going to notice that you're creating something uniquely your own, having all of this inspiration and then filtering it through you as a person is going to create something completely unique. Like no one has ever seen before. You're not going to be just like a copycat and all these other individual painters you're going to be you. And that's really important.

You, as a painter, like you don't want to be a copy of. Why would someone want a copy of an Erin Hanson painting, or it will be Alex and painting when they can have an original from you. And that's, what's really important. And that's what I really want to emphasize when it comes to style. I don't want you to pick just one individual artist, draw inspiration from, I want you to look at all of time and history. Human civilization has lived for thousands of years. There's so much to draw from. Rea

lly just take the time to explore what's out there. Collect what inspires you. I figure out why it inspires you and how you can make your art look like that. And if you're interested in learning about how to create a consistent creative practice, you can actually follow the curriculum that we just set out. Consider watching this video right here. And that's all I have for you guys today. I hope you have a great rest of your day and I'll see you in the next one.