Find Your Style: an Actionable Guide to Develop Your Illustration Style

Brooke Glaser opens with a guitar analogy: noodling around eventually produces a style, but deliberate scales and drills get there faster. That framing sets the tone for the whole course. Rather than telling students to just draw more, Glaser breaks style into its component parts, shape, color, line, texture, and form, and gives a specific exercise for each one.

The backbone exercise is the master study, where students recreate a piece by an artist they admire. Glaser demonstrates this on a Van Gogh self-portrait, thinking aloud about brush order, why some edges get an outline while others rely on hatching, and how the underpainting colors bleed into later layers. She is explicit that this is private practice, not portfolio material, and flags the legal and ethical line between studying a piece and selling a copy of it. This section does the most work of any single lesson because it turns "look at art you like" into a repeatable analytical habit rather than a vague inspiration-gathering step.

The exploration exercises

From there the course moves into the shape, color, line, texture, and form lessons, each built around the same milkshake or sundae reference image redrawn in different treatments: geometric, organic, and something in between. Watching one object rendered three distinct ways makes the abstract idea of "stylization" concrete, and the repetition across five separate elements reinforces that style is a set of independent choices, not one instinctive blur. The texture lesson is a practical highlight, distinguishing implied texture (drawn marks that suggest a surface) from actual texture (the literal grain of a medium), and showing digital-specific tricks like using multiply blend mode with a selected layer to add grain only inside an existing shape.

The course consolidates all of this into a personal style guide, where students fill in adjectives describing their work's look and vibe, list recurring subjects, and combine everything into a single sentence like "I create colorful, tranquil scenes in Procreate." This step is simple but genuinely useful as a way to externalize instincts that are otherwise hard to name.

Voice, comparison, and the guest segment

The back half shifts from technique to mindset, covering artistic voice, working in multiple styles, and consistency. The comparison lesson is unusually thorough for a drawing class, offering ten specific coping tactics, avoiding passive scrolling, comparing current work only against one's own past work, and consuming inspiration from a different medium than the one being created in. Whether this material belongs in a style class depends on the student; some will find it essential, others will wish for more drawing time instead.

A bonus conversation with illustrator Gia Graham adds a useful counterpoint, arguing that style takes up to a year of consistent practice and periodic self-review to fully emerge, which tempers the course's "faster" promise with a realistic timeline.

The course is intermediate by design and says so upfront, so brand-new artists will likely find the exercises frustrating rather than clarifying. Procreate is the working medium throughout, though Glaser notes the principles translate to other tools. The biggest limitation is that the exercises assume a student who already has a body of work and just needs to organize it. For that specific person, the shape-color-line-texture-form breakdown and the master study method are genuinely more actionable than the usual "draw a lot" advice, even if the mindset lessons occasionally dilute the practical momentum built by the earlier exercises.

What you will learn

• ·How to run a master study on an admired artist's piece without plagiarizing it, and extract transferable technique decisions from it
• ·How to deliberately vary the same subject through geometric, organic, and realistic shape treatments to see stylistic range
• ·How to build a personal style guide using fill-in-the-blank prompts (visual adjectives, vibe words, subject matter, medium)
• ·How to treat color, line, texture, and form as separate, practicable design levers rather than one blurry instinct
• ·Concrete coping strategies for creative comparison, including conscious social media consumption and comparing yourself to your own past work
• ·How to produce a small cohesive series of four illustrations that demonstrates a chosen style in practice