JONWAYSTAN

One of the most common questions newbie artists ask is “how do I find my own art style?”

The usual advice comes in two flavours. The first says just draw a lot. Put in the mileage, fill the sketchbooks, and eventually a style will land on you. The second says do master studies. Copy the artists you admire, mix and match what you take from each of them, until you arrive at something you are comfortable with. Both of these work, and I am not here to argue against them. But notice that both of them are about the hand.

After I finished my master’s degree, I found another way in, and it barely touches the hand at all. That way is studying.

By studying I don’t mean only studying the final outcome of art, the finished picture and how it was rendered. I mean going further back, into the things sitting behind the picture. Critical theory. Art history. Culture, folklore, craft traditions, the material a thing was made from and why that material was available in the first place. Once you know why a movement happened and not just what it looked like, you stop seeing a style as a look you can borrow. You start seeing it as an answer somebody gave to a problem they had.

When you take in knowledge from these areas, you can condense it into the creation. Narrative starts to enter the work on its own, without you forcing a “concept” onto it afterwards. One stroke from a master is not simply a drawing on paper. It is a condensation of his training, his teacher’s training, the tools he had access to, the paper he could afford, and everything he had lived through by the time the brush touched the surface. That is why copying the stroke never quite gives you the stroke.

Looked at this way, style is less a look and more a set of decisions you keep making. What you choose to leave out. Which stories you keep returning to. Which shapes you trust and which ones you find dishonest. Those decisions have to come from somewhere. If nothing has gone in, there is not much to decide with, and the drawing defaults to whatever you saw on your feed that week.

These experiences and knowledge will flavour your creation and add depth to your drawings. It becomes even more valuable now that GenAI is outpacing us on generative skill. The one thing GenAI cannot do is relate history, lived experience, culture and craft into a single creation and mean it. It can produce the surface of a style convincingly, sometimes better than we can, but it has no reason for choosing that style. It was never in the room where the choice mattered. This, I must say, is where human creativity still wins.

So the next time you hit an artblock, why not step away from the desk and read some works instead. Read about a movement, a craft, a place you come from. Talk to an old craftsman if you can find one. It will definitely add some bonus to your creation, and usually the block was never in your hand to begin with.