How I found my personal art style
Tags: Illustration, Art, Style

For the past 17 years, I’ve struggled with my own art style. I never felt like I had one, and I envied those artists who seemed to have it so easy.

The biggest struggle I had with establishing my own art style was FOMO. I didn’t want to put myself in a box just in case my true style wasn’t trendy enough to be liked, appreciated or paid for. I didn’t want to miss out on opportunities to work for Pixar, have my art on the cover of the New Yorker, or create a best selling comic. I wanted it all, and I wanted a style that was versatile enough to fit all of those things.

I would spend years closely following other artists who had achieved all the things I wanted, and attempted to “Frankenstein” the perfect art style from all the things I liked from them. I thought… if Disney hired them, and my art style was like theirs, they would hire me too right? Not quite.

This method never really worked. After many attempts, I couldn’t see myself committing several years developing an art style that was purely motivated by aesthetics. I tried so hard, but it just didn’t feel right.

So in 2020, I made active changes to enjoy my art more so I could create a style that was completely mine and would evolve as I did.

For reference: This is what my true art style is at this moment.

I gave up on some of my dreams… and made a new one

The list of things I want to achieve in my life is … intense. For the longest time, it was all career related — I wanted to be a character designer, work for Disney, work on a movie set, do stop motion, do editorial illustrations for the New York Times, win awards…

These were great driving forces while I was figuring myself out, thinking about what I wanted in life and how I wanted to live it. After working for a while and achieving a lot of those goals (working for Google, drawing concepts on a TV show, winning awards, working on a music video, and making animations for luxury brands like Gucci and Mulberry), I realised that I had done enough to satisfy my extrinsic goals, and I wanted to look more inward instead.

I decided to put aside any goals where my art style would have to adapt to the client’s aesthetic (New Yorker, Pixar, Disney, Google) and made it my goal to only draw when I felt like it (it was a hobby after all). I also told myself there was no need to create work that would do well on social media. There only needed to be an audience of one, and that one person was me.

I got inspired to draw fan art again

Before this year, I couldn’t really remember the last time I drew fan art. There was (and arguably still is) a massive stigma around it— fan art has often been dismissed as not being original or ‘real art’.

Growing up I subconsciously adopted this mentality towards my own fan art, feeling like I would get in trouble for not being original. This only applied to myself for some reason, because as a consumer, fan art is one of my favourite things to see on the internet. I love the way other artists interpret something I also enjoy, and I can easily connect to their art in that way.

For me, I started drawing fan art again this year because of one particular piece of media. I saw the music video of Daechwita by Agust D (aka my BTS bias SUGA aka Yoongi) and I was just so floored by the visuals. I just wanted to capture the energy I felt from watching that MV and make it into a picture, and since then I’ve been motivated to do art when I see something that has the same energy I really love.

So pretty…

My fan Agust D art :)

It’s clear the energy from 2020 was some form of ‘cool girl/guy with an edge’, which is drastically different from the energy I had for 2019 — more whimsical, commercial and joyful (contrary to the aesthetic, I was much happier in 2020 haha).

Left: 2020, Right: 2019

My 2019 work definitely represented the style of my professional work — the side of me that was more appealing and adaptable to clients and employers. My 2020 art on the other hand, really felt like my own, something I wanted to cultivate without pressure from an audience or a client.

I separated “Designer Deb” from “Artist Deb”

This year I stopped trying to make “Designer Deb” and “Artist Deb” into one person. I always thought that I was supposed to be consistent and known for that one thing, but instead, I was putting myself in box for no reason.

I realised if I streamlined my design work to one specific style, it would stop me from taking on new exciting clients (e.g. Gucci vs Google are wildly different brands, yet I was able to work on both because of my skills and sensibility). On the other end of the spectrum, If I tried to make my personal art style as versatile as my professional client list I’d be spreading myself too thin, and wouldn’t be able to create art resembling anything unique. Not putting pressure on making my personal art style commercially appealing also made it easier for me to embrace my mistakes and my journey of improving my artwork slowly.

I stopped letting capitalism determine my self worth

Art and commerce are so closely linked nowadays, art can no longer be a hobby — if you’re good at something you have to sell it or make profit in some way. For an artist, the value of your art is determined by how many people appreciate it or buy it (and by today’s metric how many followers and likes you get).

If you don’t have X sales, X followers or X likes, it’s easy to interpret that as you not being valuable. It’s something I had to unlearn to truly enjoy making art for fun again.

At the beginning I only referenced photographs to make my art

On a more practical level, I decided to only reference photographs for my artwork. In the past, it was so easy for me in fall into the trap of copying someone’s else style because I liked it so much. While that is one way to learn techniques, I really wanted to do things on my own and see how I would do it without being influenced by anyone else.

Even after a few drawings it was clear that I drew things in a specific style, and from that point it gave me the confidence to keep developing that rather than look for ways to make it look like someone else’s work.

I embraced my anime roots and unlearned the bias against the style

One of the biggest things I had to unlearn was my bias against anime style art. Growing up in western culture (despite being very asian), it was easy to adopt the bias against distinctly asian things. Anime style art was seen as lowbrow, not sophisticated, and not commercially appealing in Australia (only at conventions but nowhere else really). Every artist started their career with awful anime drawings (guilty), so if you were still associated with that style it was implied you didn’t grow out of that phase and your artwork was rudimentary.

In the journey of re-discovering my own art style, I realised that I held onto this bias for so long because I was scared of what people thought, and I was worried that people wouldn’t take me seriously if my art style was a certain way. There was enough proof that my work was valuable and I was taken seriously (enough to be employed and to pay the bills), so it was easy to let go of that fear and just do what I wanted.