Find your art style FAST ⚡️ an exercise that *actually* works

developing a distinctive personal art style creates new opportunities gets your work recognized and identifiable creates impact builds relationships and it can help you make clearer decisions about where you'll go next creatively that's all fine and good but when you start figuring out what that style could even look like for you the possibilities can be paralyzing there are so many things you like but what parts can be your own without feeling like a copy of someone else in this video we'll go

through four simple steps where you'll learn how to pull the exact qualities you like about different styles and then use them together to create something new distinctive and truly your [Music] own so the really great thing about this exercise is that it's super versatile not only can It help you develop and explore different styles it helps me get out of creative block if I am in a rut or I just feel like I'm creating the same artwork over and over again I just go through these steps with a di

fferent type of style and I'm right back on track and you can also use whatever You' like to execute the style so I'll be using an iPad for this example to just walk through the steps but you could also use a sheet of paper and a pencil a Sketchbook a laptop desktop or really any art supplies you have on hand step one is to find your style inspiration and this can really be applied to any art type I like using it for illustration for typography for my hand lettering as well as graphic design and

the goal here is to find a style that has aspects to it that you'd like to incorporate into your own style I have a children's book by Oliver Jeffers that I love and then I have this book by Maro godas it's not even in English I don't even know what it says so they have a very playful and textured feeling that I want to incorporate into my own style so I'm going to show you how I borrow parts that I like where it's not crossing a line where it feels like it's too much exactly like that artist s

tyle so we're going to be using an example from Oliver Jeffers first and then I've got a surprise for you later with inspiration from Maro so I want to keep it really simple when when I'm trying to find a reference image I don't want to feel too overwhelmed and the image that I decided to use for this one is this paintbrush so the really important thing here is that when you find a reference image for the style that you want to learn more about you want to make sure that it's not depicting a sub

ject that you plan to incorporate your own style into for example I love drawing flowers so I'm purposely looking for Style reference images that are not flowers because I don't want to be too influenced in how the artist creates that subject I just want to stay completely focused on the aspects of the style so for this one I'm already seeing that texture that beautiful texture there's also a lot of different shading going on here and where he decides to place detail so all these things are like

mental notes that I'm taking before I even create I want to keep these things in mind because these are the aspects that I want to begin integrating into my own work and the way that I do that and the way that I make it sticky in my head is by actually creating it so I want to preface this by by saying that although we are going to copy the paintbrush it is just for learning purposes it's just our own personal nobody else needs to see it we're just learning from it so that's why it's important

to copy to learn but we're not going to sell the artwork we make we're not even going to share it online we're just doing it to learn from I am going to recreate this now just by looking straight at it creating it on my iPad I've just finished doing my replica of the style example and I've learned a lot while I did it I used my gouache lovers brush set for this so I'm remembering what brushes that I used that gave me the results that I really enjoyed in My outcome now that we've looked at this e

xample gone back and forth and created it now we're going to close the book turn off your layers open up a brand new document if you need to you're not looking at anything you've done that's cheating you cannot cheat in order for this to work you have to set it aside completely and not refer to it at all because now we're going going to recreate the exact same thing from memory and what this is going to do is you're going to immediately see the most important parts that you loved about that styl

e it's going to come through in your redraw and the things that were less important to you you're not going to remember what they were so the things that you don't remember you need to make up for with your own inherent taste so now you are mixing who you are and the things that come naturally to you already along with the things that you learned so this is how starting to develop your own style because it's not going to look as close to the original as your previous version because of that so I

'm going to go through this exercise and we're going to see how different the one from memory looks compared to the one that I did when I was just looking at it and trying to copy it exactly I just completed the painting that I did from memory and it is not perfect but that is okay the point of this exercise is not to create a perfect replica the point of this exercise is to integrate the the stylistic qualities of your reference into the one that you did from memory because these are the detail

s that you're going to hold on to and begin integrating into your own artwork later on so this one is the one from memory I'm going to move this over to the right and then this is the one that I painted when I was looking right at the reference image and I'm already noticing my inherent choice of a color was much softer and more desaturated than the reference image so this is something I can lean into and embrace as part of my style or if I like the more saturated look I can remind myself whatev

er color you choose you can push it a little further with a saturation and I'm learning something new about myself when I'm painting that from memory so here's where it gets fun take everything you've learned and apply it to a new subject now we don't have a reference image by an artist to refer to as we're painting our artwork we will only be equipped with the style choices that we made when we went through this exercise as I mentioned earlier I love painting flowers so I'm going to apply apply

the style to a flower now and you can use a true reference image if you'd like I love this flower color guide for choosing flowers that I like to draw I can get color and shape references and I made a lot of the flower stamps that I developed for my bouquet maker brush set off of real flowers and I just have a flower stamp that I can work off of so I'm going to stamp this in I am going to make my own color choices I'm going to add texture where I want to and I'm going to mimic everything I lear

ned from Oliver Style into a flower by not looking at any other artist's work I've just completed the flower in Oliver style and I want to share some of the choices that I made as I was applying that style to this flower I remembered my fine line details that are just a little bit darker or lighter than the background color so on the leaves I just integrated those lines and then just kept it really rough that really beautiful Edge texture on the leaves and the stem so that's the full exercise bu

t I promised a surprise at the end and that surprise is what happens when you combine what you learn from one artist with another artist so here's maro's book and Maro paints with a much looser style than Oliver does Oliver is still pretty structured compared to maro's like explosion of playful fun and she incorporates so many different textures she's truly a mixed media artist so I really love that about her and I like the structure of Oliver's but I wanted to add a little more playfulness into

mine and a little more mixed media feeling so I looked through her book she does have quite a few don't need to look at that it's got a lot of naked pictures so I found this one down here that I really like this is the one I used when I repeated the exercise from start to finish again so I want to show you what those examples look like this is the one that I painted by looking directly at the reference image and then this is the one that I painted straight from memory so learning that I then ap

plied what I learned from maro's Style and what I learned from Oliver's style and then I applied it to a flower again the same exact flower so if you'll remember this is the flower that I painted just using what I learned from Oliver style and applying it to a brand new subject and then after I did the exercise with maro's work this is the flower that I got by mixing both what I learned from Oliver and from Maru and I love it so much more so it's just so cool once you start going through this ex

ercise with numerous artists and you're borrowing the things that you like most it just becomes more and more your own so now I have this outcome this style that doesn't look exactly like maro's and it doesn't look exactly like Oliver's it's becoming more mine because I'm I'm integrating exactly what I love the most on top of the little pieces that I pulled from both of them so that's the full exercise and it's obviously very flexible for any art type that you would like with as many artists as

you would like if this was helpful please hit the like button subscribe and I will see you next week