On Finding Your Art Style - ISSUE 004

and Aspiring Towards Consistency

In 7th grade, I was given the green flag from my parents to download Instagram.

Out of a combination of them understandably and responsibly not wishing their middle-school-aged daughter to plaster her face and personal information on the Internet, as well as my preexisting awareness of the Internet hosting hubs of art communities, I decided I would try posting my art on my account.

I was extremely fortunate to have found only positivity and encouragement in Instagram’s art community (I’m very aware of the disasters that many artists who post their art for the rabid Instagram crowd for whom it takes 99% of their brain power to resist screeching some kind of slur in the comment section), which is especially surprising considering the ill-formed furry-adjacent horrors that sprang from my hands those days.

One thing I was introduced to as I settled into the Instagram art community was the idea of finding your art style.

I wasn’t new to the desire to find my “thing” in art (I remember being as young as nine years old going in and out of subject obsessions for my art, each time thinking I’d finally found what my thing would be; some of which were over-the-top scenes of dolphin pods, minimalized Picasso rip-offs, and racehorse portraits)—but I was new to this desire being a source of stress for artists. Not infrequently, I would come across artists sharing their frustration online about failing to find an art style in which they could produce works with consistency.

Being new to Instagram’s art community, I internalized this and decided it must be important for me, too, to find my art style and achieve the Holy Grail of posting lots and lots of art with the same visually-obvious defining qualities.

But it wasn’t just seeing other artists vent about wanting to do this that instilled this desire in me—it was also observing the big players of the Instagram art community. There are a lot of things to be said about what generally defines the most popular art creators (that’s an article for another time), but one thing easily noticeable is that, by and large, these creators are highly consistent in producing art with similar appearances.

They’ve “found their art style”, and have stuck to it—whether that be digital drawings of Disneyfied fashionable women, jumbles of neon colors under scraggly black line art, or whatever else.

And seeing this art style consistency in popular social media artists is no coincidence. In fact, it’s a large part, I think (unfortunately), of what’s made them so popular; because following someone on social media isn’t only an expression of liking their current content, but also a way of curating your feed for future satisfaction, many people—more so non-artists—rely on consistency as a way of assuring themselves that their “investment” in that creator is an action well-spent.

This inherently springs from social media’s function within today’s art world: it’s a creature desperate to take artists and convert them into content creators, by transforming their motivation for sharing art from expression to cultivating popularity.

To put it shortly, I suppose what I’m encouraging you to ask yourself is:

What is my goal when sharing my art?

If your goal is to merely to be a content creator—to gather as many followers as you can, by making your work as widely palatable as you can—then this desire to find a consistent art style can be perfectly logical. You want to give people something they can predict; something they can rely on.

But if your goal is to be an artist—if what drives you is expression, creativity, experimentation—then I want to offer an alternative perspective on what an “art style” really should be in the first place:

Your art style is a natural consequence of the art you create, not a static list of qualities you must try to include in your art.

The truth is, even if you have no goals in mind as to what qualities you want to include in your work in order to maintain consistency, you still have an art style!

You don’t have to curate your art style—you already have one, and it’s found in all the subconscious qualities that appear across all of your work, whether you notice them or not.

It should look like this:

Not this:

Your art style should spring from your art—not the other way around!

By the very nature of your art being created by you, it has an art style. You are your art style!

And honestly, not worrying about having a strict “art style” in all your pieces can even benefit you from a business standpoint. Ever since I started creating in whatever way I was currently feeling—instead of forcing myself to maintain the same qualities in every piece—I’ve found it’s opened up my art to a lot more commissioners.

a few of my pieces

By not tethering yourself to static qualities, you give yourself the opportunity to show your viewers your range—to show them what you’re capable of, and how you might be able to bring their ideas to life.

I’m not saying there are no reasons behind wanting to practice strict consistency—but I do think, as a general rule, it’s become a widespread obsession cultivated by social media that poses the artist as a factory rather than a creative. And I think we should fight against this monotony.