A lot of artists just starting out seem to work really hard at having their own style, heck, I know I did. I tried many times to copy other artist's styles or to amalgamate some kind of Frankenstein-style from various artists, but in the end I'd always end up making some second rate piece of art that would look like a toy that took a trip through the microwave. Not only did the art just plain look bad, it had no consistency to it.(if you're going to make something mediocre at least be consistently mediocre)

It wasn't until I got great guidance from my first painting teacher in college that I was trying too hard to be unique when I already was. The first day of Intro to Painting she had everyone paint a still life, without any other instruction. Some of these paintings were pretty good, some looked like a sleepy chimp's finger-painting. Our teacher watched us paint, how we approached the subject and how we handled the paint. Our next project was to do a master-copy painting, a classic technique to learn to paint. Copying a painting was about the most unappealing idea to younger-me in the world, "how could painting a painting that was already painted by some old dude teach me anything?". Hopefully my thought process wasn't exactly that ignorant back then but for the benefit of the idea of learning let's just say I was. That project ended up changing the whole way I looked at art.

My teacher took into account how each student worked on their first painting and assigned them a master who had similar traits in their art. I was given the art Edvard Munch, the artist who painting "The Scream". I chose a piece by him called The Day After, and had an amazing time figuring out just how Munch would have painted it if he were using acrylics. The most unique feature of the way I was working back then was handling the paint as if I was drawing with it, instead of painting. Munch is known for having very "drawerly"(as opposed to painterly) style of rendering his images and his work really resonated with me.