How to Find Your Art Style: 10 Gentle Ways to Discover Your Own

what if your art style is simply the collection of things you naturally love to draw?

maybe it’s a certain kind of face, a colour combination soft as strawberry milk, a little teacup with a warm glaze, a particular line that glides across the page like melted chocolate, or some oddly specific detail you always find yourself coming back to. The things that you draw that make you think: Oh, I could happily draw this forever?

i think those little obsessions might tell us much more about our art style than we realize.

so today, let’s look at those little preferences and discover how they can help you find an art style that feels completely like you. Let's uncover your artstyle together. ♡

i think there’s something wonderful about having a few consistent elements in your art that make it recognizable as yours. It gives you a comforting anchor you can always return to, and once you understand what makes your style special, creating can feel much calmer and more effortless.

maybe it’s the way you draw eyes, the colours you naturally reach for, the proportions you love, or the kinds of details you always enjoy adding. Whatever those things are, repeating them again and again gives your artwork a delicious little thread running through everything you make.

and there’s something deliciously relaxing about that familiarity. The more often you draw the things that already feel natural to you, the more comfortable your hands become with them. It’s a bit like making the same honey-spiced tea loaf over and over again until you instinctively know how much butter to fold in and exactly how long to let it rest. You’re not starting from the beginning every time, so you have more freedom to focus on the fun parts.

i think everyone has something they naturally gravitate towards in art. There’s usually a particular combination of shapes, colours, subjects, or details that makes you feel completely full of ideas. Paying attention to those things can make you incredibly powerful as an artist.

they become your creative core, the little filter through which you collect new inspiration. You can still love other artists, experiment with new ideas, and discover completely different things, but your own preferences remain underneath it all, giving everything you create a sense of connection.

and I think that’s one of the sweetest parts of having an art style: you always have a familiar place to return to. Like a warm loaf of bread beneath layers of jam, honey, and creamy butter, your core gives everything else something delicious to build upon.

i think the very first step is to become truly aware of what you genuinely love to draw. So take some time to look through your old drawings and ask yourself: What do I keep drawing naturally?

we often move from one drawing to the next without noticing our own patterns. Maybe you keep drawing the same kind of face, using the same handful of colours, or adding certain details again and again. Because these choices come so naturally to you, you might not even realize how much they already say about your taste.

pay particular attention to the things that give you that little rush of pure happiness when you look at the finished drawing. Which drawings make you feel completely full of ideas? Which details make you think, Yes, I love this? Those are the things worth following.

maybe you always give your characters delicate eyelashes or rosy cheeks that make their faces feel warm and freshly blushed. Maybe you love drawing tiny bowls filled with seasonal fruit, a particular kind of clothing, soft sketchy lines, or a certain colour combination. These recurring details are like little cravings, and you keep coming back to them because you genuinely enjoy them.

you might find that your taste has been there all along, scattered across your sketchbooks like crumbs from your favourite puff cone. Once you start noticing those recurring choices, you can lean into them more deliberately.

and that’s where things become really exciting. The more you understand what naturally fills you with joy and ideas, the easier it becomes to build your art around those things. Instead of constantly searching for what to draw next, you have your own little collection of favourites to return to.

so look through your drawings with fresh eyes of a doe. Notice what you already love. Your style might be much closer than you think.

i think one of the nicest ways to discover your style is to give yourself plenty of room to play. Pick something small, like a girl, a cat, an eye, a teacup, a little house, and draw it several different ways.

change the lines. Make them feathery-soft, then thicker. Make the shapes rounder, flatter, chunkier, or more delicate. Change the eyes, proportions, colours, shadows, textures, or amount of detail. You can even keep the drawing almost exactly the same and simply change one feature to see how much the feeling changes.

try muted colours like strawberry milk, warm cream, dusty peach and pistachio, then make another version with glossy cherry red, raspberry pink, golden custard yellow or syrupy orange. Give your character tiny sleepy eyes, then enormous round ones. Make the nose a little curved mark, then a tiny button shape. Draw soft, velvety lines, then thick ones with a satisfyingly buttery weight beneath your pencil.

you can play with shapes in exactly the same way. Make a cat plump and rounded, with paws like warm bread rolls, then stretch its body into something long and elegant. Try tiny sleepy eyes, or round glossy ones like drops of caramel. Give it thick, juicy lines, then thin ones that trail across the page like melted chocolate.

You might discover that softer lines make your drawings feel wonderfully tender, almost like pressing your finger into the top of a freshly baked cake. Maybe thicker lines make you ridiculously happy. Maybe you love blushy cheeks, delicate eyelashes, flatter colours, or an almost excessive amount of detail.

this is really just about noticing those reactions. Which version makes you immediately think, Oh, I love that? Which colours make you excited to keep drawing? Which kind of line feels especially satisfying in your hand?

It's a little like tasting the same warm pastry with different fillings, like vanilla cream, raspberry jam, salted caramel, melted chocolate, and realizing which one makes you want another bite.

those reactions are valuable clues. You don't have to know exactly why you love something yet. Just keep playing, keep experimenting, and pay attention to the choices that make creating feel especially joyful and natural to you.

over time, you'll start collecting your favourites. Maybe it's the soft lines, the rounded shapes, the warm colours, the tiny details, or some combination you haven't even thought of before. Those are the choices worth bringing into more of your drawings.

the goal isn't to make every experiment perfect. It's simply to discover what makes you happiest to draw, and then make more of that.

another great way to understand your art style is to look through the things you already save. Open your Instagram saves, Pinterest boards, YouTube likes, screenshots, reblogs, and saved posts, and pay attention to what keeps catching your attention.

look for the things that stir something in you, like curiosity, longing, nostalgia, excitement.. Those reactions are useful clues. Sometimes an image stays in your mind almost like the taste of a delicious meal, like the buttery sweetness of a warm cinnamon pastry that lingers long after the last bite. If something keeps drawing you back, there’s probably something about it that you genuinely love.

notice what appears again and again. Maybe you keep saving the same kinds of faces, interiors, clothes, illustrations, compositions, textures, or subjects. You might have been collecting your visual taste for years without ever consciously noticing it.

pay attention to colour, too. Perhaps you constantly save buttery yellow, strawberry pink, dusty blue, pistachio green, tomato red, vanilla cream, or chocolate brown. Maybe peachy orange, milky white, blueberry blue, and warm caramel keep appearing in your saves. You can gather a few of your favourite combinations into little colour palettes and see which ones make you especially excited to draw.

i also love paying attention to why I saved something. Was it the colour? The way the character was drawn? The atmosphere? The composition? A particular texture or tiny detail? You don't need to analyse every image, just notice the things that consistently make you stop scrolling.

eventually, you’ll have a delicious personal collection of the things you genuinely love, almost like a little box of your favourite treats. And when you know what keeps inspiring you, you have a much clearer idea of what you want to bring into your own art.

your line quality can become one of the strongest signatures of your art, so pay attention to the lines you instinctively make and find the most comforting. Which kind of lines feel the most delicious beneath your hand?

perhaps you love soft, sketchy lines that overlap like delicate layers of honey pancakes with cinnamon, or thin and dainty ones that freely trail across the page like little feathers.

maybe you love bold, graphic marks with the thick, glossy richness of chocolate, or wobbly, handmade lines that feel slightly imperfect and tender. Perhaps you naturally reach for long, flowing curves, letting your pencil sweep across the page, or you prefer angular, structured shapes with a little more definition.

you might love loose, expressive lines that move freely across the paper, or tiny, careful marks that build up slowly through layers of detail.

there is no right kind of line to have. Just notice which ones make drawing feel especially satisfying in your hand.

those are your comfort lines. And the more you let yourself use them, the more naturally they can become part of what makes your artwork feel like yours.

i think one of the easiest ways to understand your own taste is to simply start keeping track of the things you apparently can’t stop drawing.

create a page in your sketchbook called “More of This.” Whenever you make something and catch yourself thinking, Ooh, I love that, don't brush past it. Circle it. Put a little star beside it. Write it down.

maybe you love soft strawberry pinks, pistachio greens, warm custard yellows and deep chocolate browns. Maybe you adore thick, buttery lines, delicate feathery marks, sleepy expressions, oversized clothes, tiny flowers, dramatic shadows, old-fashioned interiors, decorative borders, messy textures or delicate hands.

perhaps you love the slightly faded sweetness of old children's books, the tiny details on vintage packaging, or the wonderfully expressive faces in animated films. Maybe there's an illustrator whose colours you adore, another whose linework makes you want to draw, and a painter whose compositions make you stare at the picture like a child looking through a beautifully decorated shop window.

write all of it down.

and don't only collect the obvious things. Pay attention to your weirdly specific little obsessions too: the particular aesthetic, subject, character, decade, motif or mood that always makes you happy to see it. Those oddly specific preferences can be some of the most interesting parts of your taste.

you could even make a list of everything you love drawing, without trying to make it sound sensible or impressive. If a tiny teacup, a certain kind of hair, little birds, old-fashioned dresses or rosy cheeks immediately comes to mind, put it on the list.

over time, you'll have this lovely collection of your own visual preferences: a little catalogue of the colours, shapes, subjects, textures and details that make you want to keep looking.

and instead of asking yourself, “Is this my style?” I think it's much more useful to ask:

did I enjoy making this? Would I draw this again? What part feels especially like me? What would I change?

those questions bring you back to your own taste rather than someone else's idea of what your style is supposed to look like. You don't have to figure everything out at once. Just keep noticing what makes you think, Ooh, I love that.

then make more of it.

bluntly, indulge in what you love drawing. Don't float away from it all the time.

if you love drawing a certain kind of character, draw them again. If you love a particular colour palette, use it. If you love tiny flowers, pretty clothes, little houses, expressive faces, soft lines, or whatever oddly specific thing makes you happy, keep coming back to it.

let yourself stay in that sweet place for a while.

there is something so comforting about drawing what already feels good to you. You don't have to spend every moment searching for something new. You can simply enjoy the things you already know you love, and that feeling of familiarity can open you up to relaxation and new ideas.

in fact, I think indulging in what you already love can be incredibly inspiring. When you're comfortable with what you're drawing, your mind has more room to wander, play, experiment, and come up with even more ideas.

so don't float away from the things that make you happy just because you've already drawn them before.

stay there. Indulge in them. Draw more of what you love.

one of my favourite ways to develop a style is to draw things I wish existed.

ask yourself, “What would I love to see illustrated?” What kind of little world would you actually love to look at on paper? And then let the answer become as specific and indulgent as possible.

perhaps it’s a tiny moonlit bakery, with warm bread cooling in the window and little cakes covered in berries and cream. Maybe it’s a cottage inside a giant flower, with tiny windows and a winding staircase, or a little tea shop where woodland creatures sit around warm cups of tea while blackberry tarts and honey cakes are passed around.

i find that when you draw things you genuinely wish you could spend time in, the ideas begin to flow by themselves. You start imagining what the place would look like, what might be inside, who might live there, what you would see through the windows, and all the tiny details you would want to add.

you can simply keep following those thoughts and see where they take you. One little idea leads to another, and before you know it, you've created the kind of world you would have loved to discover somewhere else.

and I think that is such a beautiful way to develop your style: draw the things you wish existed, exactly the way you wish they existed.

i think one of the easiest ways to make your illustrations feel more like your own is to combine two things you already love.

maybe you love drawing flowers and you also love fashion, so you start adding botanical details to dresses, hair, and little accessories. Maybe you love pretty interiors and whimsical details, or romantic figures and old architecture.

allow yourself to play around with the different things that inspire you. Let your interests come together in the same drawing and see what happens. You might end up with flower-covered dresses, tiny rooms filled with unusual details, or figures surrounded by beautiful old buildings and soft architectural shapes.

and don't forget to use your own life as reference material, too. Draw your favourite mug, your room, the flowers you see often, clothes you love wearing, objects on your desk, places you've visited, or little things from your everyday life.

your style becomes more personal when your drawings contain things that genuinely reflect your personality. Intimate memories, favourite objects, places and little obsessions naturally give your art something that nobody else could have created in quite the same way.

what makes your fingers itch to pick up a pencil? What makes you want to open a fresh page and immediately start filling it? Follow those things. Follow whatever genuinely fascinates you, especially the oddly specific things that give you that wonderful spark of excitement just from thinking about them.

you don't have to invent a personal style from scratch. You can simply keep bringing more of what you love into your drawings, letting all those different interests mingle together until your art naturally starts to feel like it belongs to you.

i think it can be really helpful to notice exactly what you love about other artists.

perhaps one artist has a colour palette that feels like strawberry jam, vanilla cream and warm honey. Another draws proportions that are wonderfully round and soft, almost like little scoops of chocolate mousse. Someone else creates backgrounds so full of tiny details that looking at them feels like stepping into a beautifully prepared little dreamworld.

maybe you love the way someone draws hair, but not their colours. You adore another person's architecture, but prefer someone else's characters. Perhaps you love one artist's linework, another's compositions, and someone else's little motifs.

notice those things. Write them down. Gather all the visual details that make you stop and think, I love this.

you might love the colour palette of one illustrator, the line quality of another, the compositions of a painter, the faded sweetness of old children's books, the tiny details in vintage packaging, or the expressive faces in animated films.

then let yourself play with combining them in your own drawings. Delicate linework from one source, your favourite proportions, your own characters, your own textures and motifs. See what happens when all these things meet your own taste.

because you aren't simply copying one person's style. You're noticing what delights you, collecting those preferences, and bringing them into your own visual world. Over time, they naturally mingle with your memories, habits, favourite subjects and little quirks.

it's a little like choosing your favourite parts from several beautiful desserts: the vanilla from one, the berries from another, a little caramel from somewhere else, and then discovering that the combination tastes completely different once you've made it your own.

that's the fun of collecting inspiration. You get to taste what you love, notice what makes you want another bite, and then bring those discoveries back to your own page.

pay attention to what people respond to in your artwork.

maybe there’s a particular illustration you've made that everyone seems to notice, the one they come back to, compliment, save, or share. You can even ask people directly what they like about your artwork or what they would love to see more of.

sometimes other people can spot little things in our artwork that we've become too accustomed to notice ourselves. They might love a particular colour combination, the way you draw eyes, a certain character, or some tiny detail you didn't even realize was especially delicious.

you don't have to let other people's opinions decide what your art should become. But their reactions can give you some lovely clues about what people are noticing and enjoying in your visual language.

and if something gets a particularly positive reaction and you genuinely enjoy making it, indulge in it. Make more of it. Take that same little flavour and play with it again. Draw another character with those eyes. Try another illustration with those warm colours. Bring back those soft lines or tiny flowers and see what else you can make from them.

i think that, bluntly, there can be so much power in reiterating and indulging in what you already feel comfortable with and genuinely enjoy. You might discover that the things other people are drawn to are also the things you secretly most enjoy making.

so don't skip over those little clues. Stay with them for a while. Keep exploring the things that make you happy to draw and that other people seem to love looking at too.

when those two things overlap, what you love creating and what other people love seeing from you, there can be something wonderfully satisfying about following that trail.

i've also found it helpful to think about how I want my drawings to feel when someone looks at them.

maybe you want to wrap the viewer in a soothing, peaceful atmosphere. Maybe you want that feeling of opening a dreamy children's storybook and discovering a world you've never seen before.

you don't have to choose one exact feeling for every drawing. I think it's lovely simply to have a general feeling somewhere in the back of your mind, something you naturally want your artwork to carry.

maybe you want your drawings to feel like stepping into a warm room after being outside in the rain, with a warm loaf of bread, a book, and a cup of cocoa on the table. Or perhaps you want that dreamy, ethereal feeling of opening a tiny door and wondering what could possibly be hiding on the other side.

once you have that feeling in mind, it can start guiding so many of your choices naturally. You might reach for softer colours, faded textures, warm pools of light, delicate lines, crowded little details, or certain kinds of characters and places without even thinking too much about why.

and slowly, all those choices begin to create a similar feeling from one drawing to the next.

your style isn't only about how you draw something. It's also about how your drawings make someone feel when they look at them. That feeling can quietly connect all the colours, subjects, details and little worlds you create, until someone can look at your artwork and recognize that particular feeling as yours.

i really love making little moodboards because it's so much easier to understand the kind of art you want to create when you can see all your favourite things gathered together in one place.

gather the artwork you absolutely love, whether you've drawn it yourself or found it from another artist, and put it all together. Think of it less as a strict reference board and more like a breakfast plate covered in the most delicious eggs, cheese and berries. You’re simply collecting the things you want more of.

and you don't have to save only complete artworks. Sometimes it's one tiny part of an illustration that catches your eye, the way someone draws flowers, a particular colour combination, a beautiful dress, a little architectural detail, golden light falling across a room, a certain kind of face, or even just a few lines you love. Add those too.

you can also bring in photographs, fabric, flowers, old book pages, packaging, clothing, ceramics, architecture, colour swatches, anything that has an atmosphere you're naturally drawn to.

the key is to collect the things that make you feel inspired almost immediately. If you see something and instantly think, I love this, put it on the board.

then step back and look at everything together. Notice what keeps appearing. Maybe the same colours, shapes, textures, subjects, kinds of faces, flowers, clothing or little details keep showing up, even though the individual images came from completely different places.

and that's where a moodboard becomes so useful. You're simply collecting evidence of what you already love. After enough pieces have gathered together, you may start seeing little threads connecting everything, and those threads can tell you a lot about the visual world you naturally want to create.

your art style is something you uncover by paying attention to what you repeatedly love, what you naturally draw, what you can't stop coming back to, and what you want your drawings to feel like.

you don't have to force yourself to invent a style from scratch. Just keep noticing the things that make you happy to draw. The colours you reach for again and again. The little details you always seem to add. The subjects you never get tired of. The lines that feel delicious beneath your hand. The kinds of worlds you love imagining.

let yourself indulge in those things. Draw them over and over again, simply because you love them and because they give you that little spark of inspiration.

Keep experimenting. Keep collecting little pieces of inspiration. Keep following those tiny preferences wherever they lead you. Let your interests mingle together, let your taste change, and keep making the things that genuinely excite you.

and then, one day, you might look at your drawings and realize that you've been creating your own little style all along.

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