Hello, creative people! Today’s article is a quick and fun art exercise to find your art style. You can also try it to learn more about your already-known art style or to figure out more about the aspects of your persona that you haven’t mastered yet. 

This fun art exercise is very easy, yet it requires some attention, and you can try it at any stage of your creative journey. I believe that creative work is self-expression, as it is the self-excavation of digging inside and figuring out what we’re capable of doing and creating. 

In a previous article: How to Find Your Art Style: Easy Guide for Beginners. I pointed out that an art style could be seen through an element or a bunch of elements. I want you to think of your style as an emergence instead of a thing. Your art style is how many smaller things come together to make a bigger picture, and just as you can’t summarize who you are in one neuron, your style can’t be summarized in one artwork! You need to create many times, fail many times, and spend a greater effort and you will eventually figure out or create your own style.

What are the building blocks of an art style?

For this art exercise and in order for you to find out more about your art style, you need to know what an art style is made of. To me, an art style is a mix of identity, taste, experiences, and experiments. 

Identity

Your identity is the things that you can’t change about yourself, like who your parents are and the fact that you are a weird combination of them both. If your parents are an introvert + extrovert you might be an ambivert or a big introvert who sometimes feels the need to socialize.

Taste

Your taste is the things that you genuinely love, those small or big things that light you up in the gut! That excites you! This is not about your skills or the things you can do; it’s just about your receptivity and what you like. Which art is good depends on your taste; which art is bad?

Experiences

Your experiences are everything that ever happened to you. Memories, wounds, where you grew up, your friends, your healing journey, the difficulties you overcame…

Experiments

Your experiments are the things you try, the different mediums you’ve ever worked with, the jobs you’ve had, and the things you’re good at… It’s basically the sum of every experiment that taught you more about your strengths, successes, mistakes, failures, and weaknesses.

Moving to the art style exercise

with the previous four blocks being mentioned and explained. Let’s jump straight into the exercise.

You are going to head to Pinterest, and create 4 boards for this. A board for identity, another for taste, a third for experiences, and a last for experiments. And you pin 6-12 pins on each board. 

For the identity board, analyze your parents. What’s special about every single one of them and what do they have in common?

For the taste board, look for images that make you feel strong emotions, like certain cars, certain aesthetics, an architectural style…

For the experiments board, you can take pictures of your own artwork where you were a bit adventurous and ended up liking the outcome or anything that sparked an idea for a future project or different artwork.

The experiences board should have things like where you grew up, a place you used to play at, a grandparent’s home, a trip you’ve been to with your friends or partner…

Art Exercise to find your Art Style

Now that we have these boards done. It’s time to move on to the next step.

Your next step will be to search for patterns

Go back to your boards and analyze the data you have, the things that get the most repetitive or that make you feel something more than others reflect your core values and make up your style.

The elements could be aesthetic things, practical things, thematic or intuitive things that you don’t even know why you added to the boards. Try to pinpoint what it is about these pictures that hit you. Self-knowledge is a superpower. 

And you find yourself in a controversial position where you’re thinking: Do I choose this part of me or the other part? My answer is that creativity is matching both of those parts together. 

This is the list I was able to get out with from this exercise: 

Your next step is to translate these elements into an artwork

Do your artworks reflect these values and persona patterns? Or are you just creating art that would maybe impress others? 

Bring those elements from the previous list and create something that gathers them. Add every part that speaks to you. You are a combination of all the lings you love and find interesting. Being creative is being vulnerable, just be open to opportunities and self-knowledge.

Conclusion

An art style means making a body of work (many pieces of art) that does all the things that you like. A set of creative choices that satisfy your own elusive definition of creative perfection. Brainstorm your style thru observation and in your own head but know that, making stuff in an actual paper, seeing it, failing, and making mistakes is the only way that will reveal the patterns and clues that will lead you to find your authentic art style.