Developing your own art style
I keep on seeing a lot of people fret about developing his/her own style. Honestly, I think everyone already has a style, but fretting about it impedes development. o_o
For one thing, it's okay to take influence from different artists, a style is never wholly original because influence is inevitable. You should be checking out other artist's work, it's how you learn. You can copy a style, and make it your own. Sounds wrong, right? Lol in art a lot of 'wrong' things are okay.
My friend http://toonikun.deviantart.com used to get a lot of criticism for drawing too similarly to a huge influence of his: http://kidchan.deviantart.com
He was down in the dumps for a while, but he continuously worked on his art and I can safely say that although there are still similarities, toonikun has definitely created a niche for himself.
Also, don't worry about consistency! You don't want to pigeon hole yourself into one 'look.' In fact, you SHOULDN'T because that stunts growth as an artist. For example, as much as I love Audrey Kawasaki and admire her technique...once you saw one of her works you pretty much saw her entire gallery because everything looked the same. Only recently has she been changing things up a little.
Also, you do have a style, because everyone draws differently. How you hold a pencil, how you line things...etc. these are all aspects of artistic identity. A style is unique because it is the culmination of the artist's likes, dislikes, habits...etc. Our personality bleeds into how we create our pieces unconsciously. I'm an extremely unorganized and messy person, and that definitely reflects in my art. I don't even colour in the lines lol. But I'm fine with that, because that just means I'm more comfortable with a painterly style. Meanwhile, a neatfreak would ,more likely than not, be OCD over cleanliness of the lines and colours. This OCD is very good for crisp/clean styles such as cell shading and vectoring.
Here are ways personal preferences aid in style establishment
ex) Artist A really likes the colour purple and dislikes the colour green, that will probably reflect in the general colour choices he makes, which gives his gallery a distinct colour pallet.
ex) Artist B likes using thick black lines to outline her work, that can develop into a signature look.
ex) Artist C is fond of landscape, so a lot of his work focuses on background as opposed to human subjects. ex) http://ashwara.deviantart.com/gallery
ex) Artist D really enjoys story telling, so his work might have a lot of narrative aspects to it. ex) http://pascalcampion.deviantart.com/gallery/
ex) Artist E's strong point is character design, which would probably be the focus of his works. ex) http://endling.deviantart.com/gallery/
this is seen through the simplistic backgrounds, which highlight the detailed human subjects.
You can draw mainstream anime and still have a distinctive style. There are so many ways to convey a piece of yourself through your work. You could ask my friend and I to copy a certain drawing/style and in the end you would probably be able to tell some minute [or not so minute ...] differences just by the way we draw our lines.
I just felt like putting this out there because I see an awful lot of "I have no style D;" comments. x___x IDK, feel free to discuss? Lol