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| Adriaan van Dis, Dutch author. Side stitch # 14 |
How do we know when we have found our style?
Bear with me- I will expand.
For the Side stich mini-project, which I am doing with fiber artist Kathryn Clark (a fellow Pikaland Bootcamp alumnus), I have just posted my 14th early morning doodle.
It started out as a sewing project, because Kathryn does textile and I have always loved sewing too. (I sew a lot of my own clothes and I did my last quilt a year ago). It was meant just to play and experiment, at the start of each day. And I like to play.
But about styles – over the course of the first two project weeks I came to realize that folding newspapers is interesting only once and that just sewing thread onto newspaper is too dull for my taste. So I have taken up the paint brush again to paint over the stitched paper.
Since I have been working with eraser cutting and Photoshop mainly over the last few months, building up my illustration portfolio, it was great to see these brush strikes appear again.
And at the same time it amazes me how many different styles one can choose to work in!
Which takes me back to the first question – how on earth do we know when we have found our style?
Changing Adriaan van Dis’s face into a contemporary art paint blob is fun, but I would not do it for a daily living.
I do want to do eraser cutting for my illustration style – mainly because I like the early 20-th century feel of it, and because I like the graphic boldness of the images.
So is it all a matter of personal taste?
Or chance? (I happened upon this style by accident while doing assignments for a short online Pikaland illustration course.)
Pikaland, a site and community about illustration hosted by Malaysian illustrator Am Ng, also produces simple little zines in which illustrators volunteer answers to illustration questions. Issue number 2 tackled ‘When does one know that a personal style has developed?’
One entry struck me because of its honesty. It was written by Linda Solovic, a teacher of illustration in St. Louis, USA. She says she tells her students ‘that the artwork they make should come naturally to them. If you are drawing or making art in a way you feel that you are always struggling to make it work, it could be a sign that you are on the wrong path.’
More interesting still: ‘Your artwork should feel like it flows from you and brings you joy. For me that meant giving up the idea I could draw with a sense of perspective (could never understand it) or that I could create artwork that was highly rendered or used techniques of light and dark like pencil shading, crosshatch or scratchboard. Some of my heroes needed just to be heroes, I had to admire their work but try to emulate them was useless.’
I heaved a sigh here.
I can’t crosshatch either.
Not well enough, anyway. I have always wanted to.
But it takes years of practice and those years I spent writing, instead of drawing.
Time to look up Linda Solovic’s website!
And guess what she has been doing lately.. Stitching!
Have you found your style yet?
This is so refreshing. As a designer i have so many people just straight up telling me they will copy me & i think that's a shame they don't want to see what they are capable of with their own creativity. Love Posie
Interesting post Kitty. I also bought that Pikaland zine.
I feel I am too in awe of/distracted by the world around me at this moment to find one particular style. Perhaps I am too easily influenced. This is my first few months of producing work regularly, so I have no real idea what it will look like in 6 months time or what my style will be. I could take more of a business approach and have a more defined vision… but then it starts to lose some of its fun for me.
Such a great question, Kitty and I love this posting. Everyone has such different ways of 'falling' into their style. And I think it evolves. I feel like there are almost two kinds of 'style': the broader style which allows you to experiment within it (like a general feeling that all the work has) and a specific style that might be a current series that relates back to your broader style. I think the hard part is finding that broader style which only happens after you make lots of series and then look back over all of them to see the bigger picture. Make sense?
Yes, it all makes sense.. I don't think you can fake a style really, and I don't think I would like to copy anyone's style either! Let alone telling someone I would! yikes.. I am just amazed at the amolunt of choices and when to know where to stop. But life is all about choices really isn't it?
Find your own style is the basic thing for all artists. Most of them don´t succeed in finding a style which caracterize them, that is the definition of a personal style, called originality in arthistorical terms. Originality is a criterium of quality in art, meaning that you can discern influences of other artists, but the whole appearance is so unique, so personal, that the artist has found his own signature which is recognizable for the beholders.
He or she has overcome the influences of others and made them work out for his own goal.
Yvonne
Hi Kitty,
Loved this pondering of yours!
Your email made me think about this question, and I think that in art there's almost nothing that's set in stone. What works for some may not work for others. What Linda said is immensely helpful because personal style is all about working with what comes naturally.
And personal style can evolve, as I've seen plenty of artists do. It's very important that they do (look at what Linda is up to now!) because it will keep you on your toes. So no matter if your work does not look the same as it does 5 years ago — what is important is the journey that it takes for you to get to where you are at this stage of your artistic career.
You can't jump directly from A to Z without overcoming a few hurdles and experimentations. So the sooner you experiment, the faster it is to find the best way you work, and also your personal style.