Thoughts on Style

“A personal style is like a handwriting—it happens as the byproduct of
our way of seeing things, enriched by the experiences of everything around us.”
—Massimo Vignelli

I’ve been thinking a lot about style recently. Style is a very abstract word, it’s difficult to pinpoint and even more difficult to get right. Style is also very subjective, and very personal.

Wikipedia says Style can refer to:

• Design, the process of creating something
• Fashion, a prevailing mode of expression, e.g., clothing
• Format, various terms that refer to the style of different things
• Genre, a loose set of criteria for a category or composition
• Human physical appearance
• Style (fiction), an aspect of literary composition
• Typeface, style is one of the three traditional design features along with size and weight: either regular, italic or condensed

What I’m referring to today is illustration style, for want of a better word. Style is a difficult thing because it’s very hard to define; is it the colours you use, the way you draw things, the way you put your illustrations together, the subject matter you cover… it could be anything. It’s very easy to pinpoint illustrators that have a very specific style, but I think that’s a rare thing to achieve, and to keep consistent.

I’ve always been led to believe that you must have a unique tone of voice, a specific style, and yet I’ve also been told you must constantly evolve, change and adapt your work – to do both is something I find near impossible to achieve. To be honest, I get bored of working in the exact same way all the time. I don’t know how people do it. When I approach a brief, I approach it from scratch every time, and I tackle it in the way I feel the brief needs to be tackled. My work has a common thread running through it, definitely, but some things look very different indeed. And I feel this can hold me back a bit.

I approached an illustration agency and they liked my work, but felt I hadn’t really reached a cohesive style yet, and that’s difficult for them to represent. I can agree with them. Let’s have a little conversational wander through my portfolio and discuss…

This is one of my most recent pieces of work, for Amelia’s Magazine. The article was about the opening of the Kitchen at Proud Camden, a very intimate and conversational place set in converted stables; the tables were communal and there was very little lighting except for candles. So the illustration was meant to seem dark yet friendly, cosy, a bit edgy, evoking the feel of the place more than the details. I think it works very well. I love working with heavy thick pencils and I’m always using overlaid texture in my work. This is just very devoid of colour. Unlike….

…This piece of work from early last year, again for Amelia’s Mag, for an article about The Book Club. I wanted to show the vibrancy and creativity of the place, using white space and photographs to balance the image. It felt like a fresh and new venture so I represented it that way. If you looked at these two pieces, would you think they were by the same illustrator? I’m not sure. And this is an issue. It shows I can work in lots of ways, for lots of types of work, but if an Art Director commissions me, they need to have some idea of what they’re getting. I think it’s best to look at my favourite pieces of work, or ones that I am proud of and have done well for me, and why.

This is fairly old now I guess but I’m still very proud of it and still love it. It was shortlisted for the 2009 Penguin Design Award and I felt like I’d really achieved a strong visual piece of work; encompassing everything I love using (pencil, flat colour, nature, texture, the macabre/dark, and strong typography). So why haven’t I continued working in this way? I really have no idea. I think it comes from this inherent part of my personality that I get bored very quickly, and am always on the look out for the new, the cool, the fresh. (I guess that’s why I’m a good trend hunter.) I think that once I had done this work, had achieved this way of working, I wanted to keep experimenting, keep pushing. I was in my third year of Uni so should have really established by style but I just love experimenting, and I never stopped.

My recipe illustrations are what got me noticed the most in 2010, so I must be doing something right with then. This illustration was featured in Cleo Magazine in Australia, I had another one published by Central Station/NVA Harvest in August, and there’ll be another one published in They Draw And Cook in America next year. A lot of my professional successes have been based around my recipe illustrations; I love doing them, but I don’t do them that often now because I get bored of working the same way.

Conflicting. I follow @TheMightyPencil on twitter, they come up with some real gems of advice, like this:

“If your illustration work in 2010 has looked a lot like your illustration work from 2009, then evolve your illustration work in 2011.”

Which is true. And I do evolve my work; but I think I evolve it too much. It skips about from brief to brief, I think it gets visually quite confusing.

“TheMightyPencilSays If your illustration work looks a lot like someone else’s, then one of you is going to have to do something better.”

That’s another thing, at least I’m not copying someone else’s style, or trying to be something I’m not. It’s definitely always me, through and through. I do get extreme envy of some people’s styles though, and wish I could work more like that. Take the amazing Sandra Dieckmann for example, her work is incredible and I wish my work looked more like this, more rich, more unique:

But then I also love Gemma Correll, and her witty, naive style (have met her in actual life, she is so lovely, and her pug is adorable):

One to watch is Jamie Mills, his style is so intricate, he must have so much patience:

And I’ve just discovered Luke Waller, I love his stuff a lot too:

“Don’t concern yourself with other’s careers. If they’re doing well it’s because they’re not concerning themselves with other’s careers.” – The Mighty Pencil

…Another bit of very good advice.

So what to do? I think the case is to just keep drawing, keep creating, but keeping in mind the direction I want to go. Honestly, I think because I don’t have as much time as I’d like for illustration, when I do create something, it feels rushed because I haven’t had the time to think about things and to improve on them. I’ll draw what comes to my head first, and I’ll send off the first completed version. If I gave myself an extra day or two I could go back and work on it again, think harder, work better. Maybe that’s the key. I don’t mind creating less if I’m proud of everything I do…. and at the moment I’m not.

What do you think? Is style something you’ve got nailed, something that just came naturally, or something you find as elusive as me? Do you have a style and get stifled by it – do you wish you could change it? Let me know, I’m really interested what other people think. x