How to develop your own painting style (without copying anyone else's)

This is one of the questions I get asked most often, and it's almost always asked with a slight note of anxiety. "How do I find my own style?" — as though it's something that might pass you by if you're not paying attention.

I want to reassure you: It will come to you!

Style isn't something you find by looking for it. It's something that emerges from consistent work over time. But there are things that accelerate it, and things that slow it right down.

Why copying doesn't work
(in the long run)

Copying other artists is a perfectly valid way to learn technique. You absorb how someone handles edges, how they approach colour, how they build a composition. That's useful.

But it becomes a trap if you do it for too long. If you spend years painting in someone else's style — imitating their palette, their marks, their subjects — you build a set of skills that belong to their vision, not yours. When you try to paint something original, there's nothing underneath it. You're lost.

The point of studying other artists should be to absorb approaches, not appearances.

Constraints are creative

One of the most effective things I've done is impose constraints on myself. Not rules imposed from outside, but chosen constraints that force me to work differently than I would by default.

Try this: for a month, only use three colours. Pick them, commit to them, and don't change your mind halfway through. At first it feels limiting. Then something interesting happens — you start discovering what those colours can actually do. You develop a relationship with them. The constraint creates intimacy.

Other useful constraints: only paint from memory (no reference), only work at a certain scale, only use one brush, only work on toned paper. Any of these will start revealing things about how you naturally see and think.

Follow what you're drawn to

The fastest route to developing a personal style is honest curiosity. What do you find yourself looking at? What subjects come up again and again in your sketchbook? What are you drawn to in other artists' work — not to copy, but because it resonates with something?

Those interests are signposts. They're telling you something about what you want to say.

I've always been drawn to the quality of light in the landscape, the feeling of being outside in a particular place, the space and atmosphere rather than the literal detail. That's what my work is about, because that's what I genuinely find interesting.

If you find yourself repeatedly painting the same subject, or responding to the same quality of light, or returning to the same kind of composition — that repetition is your style beginning to form.

Don't resolve things too quickly

Tight painters often have this problem: they resolve every mark before the paint is dry. Every ambiguous area gets corrected, every lost edge gets found, every tentative stroke gets fixed.

But style often lives in the things you don't finish. The area of a painting that's slightly unresolved — that asks the viewer to bring something of their own — is often more alive than the area that's been carefully described.

Try leaving more open. Trust the viewer to fill in the gaps. See what the painting does when you stop trying to control it.

Give it time

I'll be honest: developing a personal style takes years. Not because you're a slow learner, but because it requires enough accumulated work that patterns can emerge. You need to have made enough paintings to start seeing what runs through them.

The answer, as always, is to paint more. Not to overthink it. The style takes care of itself if you keep working.

If you want a structured way to work on this, the Abstracted Landscape course approaches exactly this question — not as a technical exercise but as a creative one. And the course bundles offer a way to explore several of these ideas across different courses and subjects.

If you're still at the stage of trying to loosen up before you can find your own voice, How to loosen up your painting covers why tight work is hard to unlearn and what actually helps.Lewis