I don’t really have a style. I have a way that I draw or model or design characters, but I don’t really have a style.
I was watching an artist on YouTube, something I do quite a lot, and they were trying something a little outside of their ordinary, but they said that they were adapting it to their own style.
Have you ever seen those articles or news pieces about how some people think in fully formed images, some people only think in words. It often comes as a wonder to many of them that there are people out there that process the world in very different ways. That one person can hold an extremely vivid, three dimensional representation of a tomato in their imagination, while another person can clearly imagine a symbolic representation of the letters in the word tomato with only a tangential connection to what a tomato is or looks like.
I imagine that picturing the perfectly realized tomato is what knowing your own art style is like.
So I do what so many people with slightly different thought patterns do. I fake it.
I have a way that my hand likes to make lines. I have an attraction to certain forms and shapes. I put those into my work and shrug at it. Maybe that’s my style. I don’t feel like it is, but if other people can look at something I have drawn or sculpted, and recognize that it might have come from me, maybe that’s all that having a style is.
I watched that artist on YouTube draw a set of portraits. They were all recognizably from the same artist. They did what they said they would do. They adapted those portraits to their own style.
Did they just use shapes and arcs that their hand could draw, and continue to reuse shapes that they were attracted to. Maybe, but I don’t think so. It seemed like they had a personal style that they had spent time crafting. They chose an aesthetic and they bent all of their art toward it.
I can honestly say that I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know what that is. That tomato doesn’t exist for me. I fake it. I make the marks I make and I bend the image in a way that solves the problem I am trying to solve. I adjust proportions, I infer emotion, I attempt to tell a story. If any of that comes out as some sort of cohesive personal style might be for other people to decide. That part of my brain just doesn’t work that way.