Multiple styles in my portfolio, should I narrow down to sell?
I pulled out my sketchbooks from the last two years and realized I have three pretty distinct bodies of work going on. Tight graphite portraits with careful rendering, loose brush pen gesture studies that feel almost abstract, and these ballpoint narrative illustrations I do on the bus. They honestly look like three different artists made them.
I genuinely enjoy all three and feel like each one teaches me something the others don't. The gesture work loosened up my shoulder and fixed that timid linework I used to have, and the tight portraits keep my construction honest. But now that I'm thinking about actually putting work out there and selling, I keep hearing that buyers want consistency. That you need one recognizable style or niche.
Does anyone here sell across multiple styles or media successfully? Or did narrowing down make a real difference for you? I'd hate to abandon parts of my practice just for marketing reasons, but I also want to be realistic about what works.
This is something I wrestled with too, in a smaller way. I paint landscapes and still life, and for a while I wondered if mixing those two on the same website would confuse people. What actually happened when I put everything out there was pretty clarifying. Over time it became obvious which work people responded to most. The sales themselves told me where to lean in. I think the idea that you need one narrow lane before you even start selling might be putting the cart before the horse. You could put all three bodies of work up, let people actually see it, and watch what happens. Either most of your sales cluster around one style, which is your answer, or people connect with your eye across all of it, and then you have real freedom. Abandoning work that feeds the rest of your practice before the market has even weighed in seems premature to me.