Discovering your art style, Huh? Art Style?
What is an art style?
It is your unique visual signature, so anything within your art practice that you are drawn to do. The combination of colours, shapes and textures you enjoy re creating, how you use your tools, your preferred medium to work with, the themes and stories you you like to repeat, All of this makes up your personal art style. You develop your art style through play, through experimentation and through practice. Take note of what you like, what you are drawn to and what you enjoy doing and then smush all that information together. Relax and enjoy the process and with enough practice your art style will appear.
Ive been a creative person my whole life, my nanna was a watercolour artist with a beautiful garden that she would paint and my grandma decorated cakes and made toys and clothes, so I was surrounded by creative women from a young age. Art was my favourite subject at school, I never felt sick going to school when it was art lesson day. My art tutor was an eccentric old man, he always encouraged me to be creative even though back in the early 90s when I was in high school art consisted of looking at the Campbells soup can picture and drawing fruit, even though the subject matter wasnt really what I wanted to draw I still loved my art classes.
I failed my GCSEs spectacularly so naturally I went to art college to study fine art, I remember wanting to do a project inspired by HR Giger, I wasnt allowed (boooooo, hissssssss, art college stifled my creativity!) to be fair I spent most of my art college years in the skate park smoking so I doubt that project would have been finished anyway.
After art college I kinda dropped off the art wagon, I dabbled in comic design and I made my own clothes but nothing serious until I hit my middle 30s when I decided to go to university, I had been sewing for a living for 10 years at that point and I wanted to study fashion design for real. I tried it and I hated it, it was too structured for me, too many rules, so I changed my specialism from fashion design to surface pattern design and bloody loved it! I worked hard and got a really good degree (which ive done nothing with but there is still time, right?) but even though I completed 3 years of a full time art degree I still didn’t consider myself to have an art style, something that you could look at and say that it was unmistakably mine. Van Gogh has a style, Monet has a style, Andy Warhol has a style, Mark Ryden has a style, I however did not.
Fast forward to 2026, I’m now 45 and am only just discovering my art style, my practice had always been so bitty and my tastes so broad I struggled to build a body of work that really expressed who I was, I think the problem was that I was trying to cram my diverse tastes in to separate little boxes that could only be opened one at a time depending on my mood, maybe the problem wasn't that I didn’t have a singular art style, maybe it was that I had too many, I’d spread myself too thin and hadn't considered that instead of doing one or two things well I was just doing everything badly, getting frustrated and overwhelmed and then simply giving up. Who knew that was a thing? Not me!
So I've stared my art journey again, I've gone back to basics, made mood boards and collected images, colour pallets, materials and inspiration, I've taken photographs to draw from and attended art classes to develop my skills, and in the past 8 months I have learnt more about myself and my artistic preferences than the past 30 years. Ive stopped trying to cram my creativity in to small separate boxes and let it all mould together in to one giant bowl of art soup.
Is it the style I wanted for myself? No, not really, whenever I thought about making art I always imagined myself painting beautiful moody portraits of stunning, gothic looking women, huge imposing churches, or sweeping landscapes with storm laden clouds. What ive actually got is a massive neon mess, full of mushrooms and creatures that make no sense, plants, people and buildings that look like a toddler has drawn them and a colour pallet that would make Leonardo da Vinci vomit. I don’t know why, but as much as I would love to have a style closer to Goya or Michelangelo my brain just can’t do it. But instead of getting frustrated and giving up I’m embracing what does make me happy, art should be joyful, not stifling. So I’m making a mess, I’m following what my instincts tell me to do and although it’s not what I imagined my art style would be all those years ago it’s growing in to something I enjoy doing, and that’s the point of art!
(P.s ive mentioned soup in this post twice now, and for a blog about art not food I think that’s good going)
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