An Artivist’s Guide to Uncover Your Artistic Style and Voice: Part 6. How to Integrate Your Style and Voice
Welcome to this mini-series about how to uncover your artistic style and voice as an artivist. In previous parts, we’ve explored and identified all the aspects of your style and voice like the difference between style and voice, personal symbols, aesthetic, vision, and your unique edge, and now it’s time to reflect on how you can integrate your style and voice and infuse your creative work with them.
I will go through some examples to give you an idea of how you can infuse your style and voice into your creative work. Be open to letting your creativity flow as you’re reading this. I recommend that you have a journal by your side, because it might spark some ideas for you that you might want to write down.
They might not be ideas you put into practice later, but they can still benefit you as they might spark some additional ideas later on.
Now, let’s dive in.
Using Your Style and Voice
What Do You Want to Infuse in Your Work?
The first thing I want you to do is to gather all the things you’ve created through the exercises in the previous posts. You will be using your ideas from those exercises in the exercises I have in this one.
If you want or need to go back to any of the previous posts in this min-series, you can do that here:
Part 2: personal symbols
Part 3: aesthetic
Part 4: vision
Part 5: your unique edge
When you’ve gathered everything, refresh your memory with what you’ve written and created. If you want to, you can highlight certain ideas and breakthroughs you’ve had and aspects of your style and voice that you want to use in your work.
When you’re done, make a list of the parts of your style and voice that you want to include in your work. That can be:
Symbols
Themes
A certain aesthetic
An event in your past
Etc.
How Can You Integrate Your Style and Voice?
Next, I want you to reflect on how you can integrate and combine your style with your voice.
If you’ve discovered that you, for example, love birds and that you value freedom, that’s pretty easy to combine.
If you’ve discovered that you, for example, like straight and clean lines but also have a spontaneous personality, how can you combine those?
Perhaps the straight lines symbolize creative boundaries or restrictions, while your spontaneity can have fun within those boundaries. It’s kind of like setting yourself a challenge, to, for example, only use blue in a series of paintings and having to force yourself to come up with creative solutions that you might never have thought of before.
Or maybe you’ve discovered that you like a darker aesthetic but want to share a hopeful message. How can you combine those?
Perhaps you can use more contrasts in your visual work or have a positive spin on your literary work.
Or, perhaps you want to share the message that there is hope even in the darkest times? What could that look like?
Here are some additional questions to help you explore how to integrate your style and voice:
Can you see any patterns in the list of the parts of your style and voice that you want to include in your work?
Are there any logical combinations?
Which combinations might be trickier to use? If those matter a lot to you, can you find ways to combine them seamlessly?
Which combinations of your style and voice resonate most with you?
Which combinations are you most excited to start experimenting with in your creative work?
How Can You Infuse That in Your Work?
Next, I want you to think about and make a list of all the ways you can use those combinations of your style and voice in your work.
Take some time to explore this logically before you put it into practice in your work, because the only way you’ll see if your combinations actually will work or not is if you put them into practice. But thinking about them logically first might give you some ideas of how to approach your experiments when you start testing them out with practice.
Make the list while considering the following questions:
How can you use your combinations in your work?
How can you use your symbols and aesthetics and combine them with your values and your edge? What would that look like in your work?
What would it look like to combine aspects of your style and voice that logically go together?
What would it look like to combine aspects of your style and voice that contrast each other or might be more difficult to combine?
What kind of creative work do you want to create, and what combinations will help you create that the most? What would that look like?
Whenever you’re done with this exercise, I want you to start experimenting with this in your creative work.
I recommend that you do it on a side project first so that you don’t mix it up with your current work. If you like what you see, you can always use that in your main work too.
Final Words
Infusing your work with your unique style and voice is a journey of exploration, self-discovery, self-expression, trial, and error. It will take time. However, the more you explore and reflect (both through journaling and through your creative work), the clearer your identity as an artist will become and the clearer message your artivism will communicate.
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