Elongated Coyotes and a note on style

Today's inexplicable brain-fart; I really cannot account for the weirdness my imagination comes out with sometimes...

Anyway! This last couple of weeks I've been grappling with overtime at work, commissions, t-shirt designs, looking for a new house, sorting out cons, worrying about bills and subsequently pretending none of this exists by playing video games. I'm in a constant state of nervous panic at the moment; great for drawing, not great for brain! It's all good though. I also had the pleasure of doing an interview with the lovely people at We Blog Artists; read it here!

But enough griping, I want to talk about style. As an illustrator, I constantly worry that my personal drawing style is rubbish. I have a lot of influences that have contributed to how my work looks now (hopefully none of them glaringly obvious) and continue to find new artists that spark ideas of my own and help push my work forward. Trying to carve out a unique "look" is bloody difficult and has taken me the last 5 years to get right and I'm still trying to polish it. What really makes an artist stand out though? There's so much out there, it's sometimes hard to know if your stuff makes any kind of impact.

I think enthausiasm has a lot to do with it which is why I try and go to as many cons as possible to meet people; I get quite manic at these but it seems to draw people in and take an interest in my work which makes me realise that personality also has a lot to do with individual style. I like to think my personality manifests itself through my work; my boyfriend told me that he thought this is what the inside of my head would look like if someone burst it open like a pinata which made me laugh and also pleased me! Does anyone else see their work as a physical manifestation of their brains? How do you go about trying to make your style stand out?