Michelle Lam

#4STYLES (Finding your "STYLE")

Added 2019-09-17 23:10:32 +0000 UTC

One question that always pops up in my inbox or comments is "How do you find your style?" And after years of beating myself up for not having a "consistent style" or not having a "cool enough style," the question I'd rather ask is "How do you find your voice?"

For me finding my "voice" was kind of like figuring out the themes of my life moments, experiences, and finding a medium that could make it easy to share that voice. One reason why a lot of my comics are super simple, scribbly, and one color is to just keep it sustainable. If I wanted to share these stories more than once, I needed to draw them in a way I could keep up with the comics. Ultimately what you see in my comics are a compromise of the skills I've learned from drawing for years while keeping it simple and clear.

A style is something that should just naturally come to you as you learn. You'll just naturally gravitate towards the things you like about what you learn. But it's not something you should kill yourself over. It's 100000% normal for your style to change according to each project's demands. Like people and their personalities, art styles are just as complex and varied, and it's really just about choosing the appropriate one, for the appropriate project to be able to communicate that voice clearly.