As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, I took the ‘Ideation & Visual Storytelling’ online course with Visual Arts Passage last summer as I’d been unhappy with my painting style for some time. During the course the instructor suggested a number of things to unearth your own unique style so that your work is more personal and interesting. I tried them all, Including the one that I thought really wouldn’t help me (which of course was the one thing that was the most helpful).
Journaling turned out to be most useful of all the tips that I received. To be honest, I wasn’t really interested in trying it to begin with as it sounded a bit too woo-woo to me and it was the last thing that I went and experimented with. But after I sat down and started writing down what I wanted my work to look like, it began to focus my mind more acutely on those elements.
Now after every painting that I create, I’ll spend about 15-30 minutes writing about what I felt went well on the painting, what needs more work and what I want to focus on next.
The other thing that has really helped me, as a result of the journaling, is that I spent some time and really honed down the artists whose I work I admire and the aspects of their work that I’ wanted to incorporate into my own personal style. This was pretty challenging as I get inspired by a lot of different artists so I had to be a bit ruthless about the sorts of things that I wanted my style to include.
I managed to get the list down to about 10 artists and since then I’ve started to analyze their work and how they go about describing different elements in their paintings, their compositional choices and the lighting they’ve used.
A few other thing's to try are:
• Experiment with a different medium that you don't have complete control over
• Create a painting or sketch from life
• Create art with a specific time limit
• Spend time looking at art where the subject matter isn’t what you ‘always’ gravitate to
• Think about the aspects of paintings that you really like and try to include those in your own work
• Create a list of thing's you like (such as movies, music and environments) and think/ write about why you like them