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

Most artists don't want you to know .

And I'm gonna tell you about style , but I'm gonna 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 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 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 .

You are forced to make that choice where you teach yourself how to paint the way you've always dreamed there's a formula to it .

It's really not that hard .

It 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 the art that you like looking at and the art that you like making .

So really try and take time to reflect on the difference between the two , like what kind of art you actually enjoy making ?

And this is also something that you'll just get more experience and more data on as you progress in 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 toward .

Don't hold yourself back just to go off .

Don't try to stick yourself into a box when it comes to subject better or medium or style .

Just collect all of the 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 artist .

And when you get home , just go online , collect it into your visual library and just save it for safekeeping .

And once you've collected all of this stuff , I want you to take the time and figure out what connects it all together .

What is the through line that you could 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 one exhibition , what would you title that exhibition ?

What would it be called ?

What would the theme of it be ?

How would you describe it ?

Marketing materials , like all of that kind of stuff , just really take your time and figure 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 space here for interpretation .

And just as an example , let's take a look at how I characterized 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 .

The line is kind of blurry and often on the spectrum we're leaning more toward abstraction .

At least when it comes to color , we're not always like mark making , rendering , 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 point to in here , there's a few pieces by Caitlin Rose who's one of my favorite abstract artists working today .

She's like just phenomenal .

She does 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 with lighting like this painting here by Daniel Vow .

I have no idea who that painter is .

And again , with Henrique Dalin , 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 .

And then like the mark making , again , organic shapes this clear to me , it looks like we're seeing the water reflected on a pond .

It's another Caitlin Rose piece .

So it's abstracted , but I can see the Monet kind of inspiration or something here reaching more toward the representational side , we have artists like did I pin 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 sort of like it takes that little bit of abstraction from the Caitlin Rose piece and brings it into a new context in the landscape setting and the representational setting .

And that's the kind of thing that I really gravitate toward .

And now that you've taken a bunch of notes on how all the pieces of art you selected are connected .

Blah , blah , blah , blah , blah , blah .

Wow .

And now that you've taken notes on how all of the pieces of art you've collected are connected .

That's a time 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 this movement or this collection of art that exhibition that we mentioned earlier in the gallery example , 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 actionable plan for how to achieve your ideal style .

And once you start working through this syllabus , I guess if we're still calling it that 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 a copycat of 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 someone else .

Why would someone want a copy of an Aaron Hanson painting or it will be Elison 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 to 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 really just take the time to explore what's out there , collect what inspires you and 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 con 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 .