The number one question on the minds of young artists is how to find their own style. Why does this question preoccupy them? Because artists find clients and commissions based on the look of their work. How their work looks is therefore very important.
However, style is something very personal—can you simply create a style to get work? The answer is both yes and no. I’d like to take you through this blog post on artstyle: Looking through they eyes of the artist.
Defining artstyle
This is how I define artistic style: a representation of how an artist perceives the world—what they see, smell, taste, feel, and hear—combined with their skill set.
A small example:
What do you see? There’s a good chance you’d say that you see a car. But I’m not so sure.
Perhaps you see that it’s a Corvette, or more specifically, a 1954 Corvette. Or maybe it’s just a photo of a red car. Perhaps you’re colorblind, and now it appears to be a brown car. Maybe this is the car your grandfather drove, more than ten years after World War II, and it brings back memories of his wild stories. Maybe these are even your stories.
So, what is it?
That’s what makes art so beautiful: you’re giving others a glimpse into your world. How that translates—whether in theater, dance, drawings, etc.—doesn’t really matter. You’re putting something vulnerable out there, and if you create something often enough, like I do with illustrations, you develop a way to put your experience into your work.
artstyle evolution
Does style always stay the same? No, it doesn’t. Art evolves with the artist. Just as your own life grows through experiences, so does an artist's work. Some refer to this as seasons or eras, such as with musicians (think of Taylor Swift's The Eras Tour).
To explain this better, I’ll refer to my own work. The pieces below are from 2016, 2022, and 2025. My skills have grown immensely, as between 2016 and 2025, I created over two thousand digital illustrations. But I’ve also gotten older and (hopefully) wiser.
Although there are a lot of differences between the pieces, you can see that it’s still my work, with a certain consistency. My use of color has remained fairly similar, perhaps slightly refined. I still use bold lines, and there’s still a lot of character in the faces and clothing.
This evolution of style happens through play, experimentation, making mistakes, and learning. I also regularly step out of my own comfortable drawing bubble, no matter how daunting that may feel. Because if you never try something new, you stagnate.
Take, for example, the pieces below. Lately, I’ve been painting more with watercolor and acrylics. I’ve also been drawing more animals—something you couldn’t have forced me to do three years ago. These works are very different from what I usually create.
Finding work with your artstyle
At a certain point, an artist has to decide whether creating art is more of a hobby or a serious career. I had that moment in 2020. Then comes the next step: finding work. Most artists find work through their portfolios.
Now that I’ve been in the business for almost five years, I have different styles for various media. I have a style for illustration, comic books en children's books.
Returning to the earlier question: "Can you just create a style to get work?" the answer is both yes and no. I’ll show this with two situations I’ve experienced as an artist:
Situation 1
Before I got the commission to illustrate a children's book for Talevision, I mostly illustrated for an older audience (think teenagers and young adults). Still, I was very eager to take on this assignment.
After some research into the genre, I combined my skills and style with the style commonly found in children's books. This is how my style developed (or rather, evolved). The new style retained the characteristics of my previous work but also produced something new that perfectly suited this assignment.
Situation 2
The other, less pleasant, situation is when I’m asked if I can create an illustration in the style of: (the illustration of another artist/AI image). As an artist, I have two options:
Try to replicate it as best as I can.
Decline the request and show my own work.
Neither option is ideal. With option 1, I probably don’t have the right skills to replicate it perfectly, it takes more time, and the end result probably won’t meet the client’s expectations. With option 2, I lose the potential job 9 out of 10 times.
The difference
The difference between these two situations lies in the challenge and the client’s request. In the first situation, the final result wasn’t set, and the artist had room to create something new. In the second situation, the only option was to create something based on another artist's work.
Another key word here is the verb want. How badly do I want this commission, and am I willing to put in the extra effort to make it happen?
Conclusion
Artistic style forms through the artist and their personal experiences. It doesn’t stay the same as previous work because an artist grows, and so does their art. Style is essential because, without it, people wouldn’t know what to expect when working with an artist. However, it’s important to seek out challenges, as you don’t want to stagnate.
So, yes, you can change your style. However, it’s a slow process—it's about playing, experimenting, making mistakes, and learning. The answer is also no: you can’t just change your style at will; it’s part of how you see the world, and that can’t be forced. Developing your style is an organic process driven by experience, not something you can easily alter for a job.
For any questions or collaboration you can contact me through this form or via e-mail: info@starringjoelle.com.
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