I've been in the same boat for the past 8 years, while I still need a lot more practice with shading, I am for the most part able to create a character design and able to make a clean drawing of them pretty consistently.
For me, 'style' has two meanings.
First, you can pick a style where you balance out 'effort' vs 'time' meaning, sometimes your style looks a certain way simply because you make compromises for the sake of time. I would love to have all my art shaded, but that takes a lot of time, and I find that having it animated is more important to me, so I only do basic cell shading. This first type of 'style' happens because you are still exploring ideas, and developing your skill. as you do things over and over again, some techniques take less time and less effort, so you may change your style as you improve. Or these can be technical limitations, such as I prefer to use vector art where possible, which isn't the easiest to shade.
Second, perhaps this is implied and expected, but I feel it is important to point out 'consistency.' it may sound super simple, as simple as breathing, but its taken me a very long time to get to something consistent. The main issue for us 'non artist' is the fact that we do not draw as often as more dedicated artist would. Practices is important, and understanding how to practice is great too, but its hard to get comfortable with making ugly practice drawings when you also have to work 40 hours, your programming your game in your free time, maybe balancing things out with friends, family and life, and at best I can get 4 hours a week to practice art, but usually its like 4 hours ever other month, so you never end up feeling good or improving in your art simply because you can't get enough practice in.
Why does practice matter? Well from what I've figured out in my 8 years since starting art, the thing that pissed me off the most about myself and about other artists was that when they start drawing, they could 'see' or at least get a 'sense' of what they were doing, but I had the hardest time being able to look at a sketch or guide lines or guide shapes and being able to 'envision' the final drawing. I could memorize proportions all I wanted, but I couldn't tell if a drawing looks like a body unless 1 I finish the drawing or 2 I use a short cut where I just color the whole body black or white, and zoom out to see if it looks good (this only really works with stylized or 2D style characters). Basically, the point of practice (at least my conclusion) is to develop this mental skill where once you get familiar enough with the techniques, you can start to sense how the art will look and turn out even from a simple sketch. Although even most artist say they can't really do this, and instead 'rely on the process' of good guides and forms in order to ensure a good filal piece, but I'll still be screaming at the video complaining about simple things, like when they draw a sphere for the shoulder I still don't know how they know the best placement for it, they always seem too far back to me, how do they know what size to make the sphere it seems like they skip mentioning anything about proportions or already are soo familiar with their favorite proportion ratio's that they just 'know' what size to make the shoulder sphere, but when the video ends the art is amazing so there must be something wrong with my art perception skills.
So how did I overcome this... inability to judge my own art and develop something consistent? Well besides using daz and blender to make a base model, there are three other aspects that define my style.
First, Quality control part 1; 3D vs 2D: I have tried lot and lots and lots of styles and techniques. 3D renders, Making custom shaders for my renders, trying to make NPR (non-photorealistic render) shaders to make anime like characters, drawing characters from scratch, drawing characters using a 3D body as a base, or even just fully tracking the 3D render. In the end, while I can get much quicker results with 3D and the shading is far better than what I've managed to achieve by hand when painting 2D characters, I find that I can never give up my love for the 2D aesthetic, and that I can make cleaner art and have more control over a 2D style than I could with a 3D style, so despite my first description for 'style' implying style comes out from 'compromising' I found that having a 2D style was so important to me, that this would take priority over time, even though I have a very small attention span and not much spare time/energy.
Second, Quality Control part 2; tools and abilities: I have lots of tools and tried lots of techniques, from sketching and shading using procreate on my iPad, and different tools need different kinds of skill, or maybe even less skill. It's easier to prototype a character in Daz, than it is to start from nothing in Blender. However, after trying everything out, when I ended deciding for my work flow was, starting with characters in daz which I have previously sculpted, maybe sending a character to Blender if I need to re-sculpt them since daz has a habit of distorting the mesh with too many morphs together, I often just use a screen shot of the character's body only in 'hidden wire' render mode, then drawing the character in Inkscape, and maybe animating them in blender. The most important part of this is the program Inkscape, which basically allows me to draw the character in very high quality with low skill, if I don't mind the process being tedious. but I find the time to draw a character with it is faster than what I can do by hand drawing even with a ref image, and the quality is basically final quality as soon as I'm done. So this is like a win win in terms of effort and time, it's just the choice of doing 2D all together that is tedious, because it add a whole extra process for making a character look 2D.
The first two aspect about my style, going 2D and the work flow of 2D, took me a few years simply because I was exploring a lot of things and learning lots of things. However, after I committed to sticking to 2D, this third and final aspect was relatively quick and fun.
Third, Style aka proportion, line weights, and final image size. Image size I explored a lot with earlier game prototypes, but basically my images would mostly be small or the size of comic panels at most, just because that's how I wanted my games to operate, either through character sprites or comic stories for cut scenes. I was studying the cartoon Xiaolin Showdown to learn how it liked to write 'evil' in its characters, but I ended up being more inspired by the show's art style and technical limitations. Mainly, I was already familiar with other videos talking about how to do line art and how to do cartoon styles, but with that in mind I deiced I liked how Xiaolin Showdown did its lines, simple but they did everything that most videos talk about, so I copied it. Using lines that are relatively thick compared to most hand drawn linework styles, and this was easy to do using inskscape. actualyl trying to make nice hand drawn lines, that taper is more of a pain in inscape so seeing a simpler style work so well in Xiaolin Showdown basically gave me the excuse to compromise on my linework and go more toony with my 2D style. Similar, when it comes to proportions, I like lots of styles, and I had a hard time judging proportions in the 8 year's I've been practicing, so I gave up. I went on line, downloaded a lot of images and art I liked and artists I liked, I threw each image into inkscape and drew guide lines and shapes onto of every art piece, and then I made a big ass spreadsheet where I documented every proportion and measurement for all the arts. I highlighted things I really liked, color coded some patterns I noticed, and compiled some notes about what I think my favorite measurements are. I then took that and drew a bunch, be it by hand, or with 3D models. I'm basically relying on these measurements, now made into character morphs for daz, to do the heavy work of getting the proportions right, since as I learned, I can't trust myself to properly judge proportions.
speaking of trust, I find it funny. over the years, I've mimicked a lot of art stylize, making character morphs that match another artist's style, some results are good, some takes a bit of artistic skill to make it work when it comes to the final 3D to 2D conversion, but when I did this art study, after I made a few sculpts, and then went back to look at earlier versions, a character design I thought looked skinny would no longer look skinny because I started exploring a thinner art style, and that would mess up my perspective on proportions. So this is what I mean when practice is important, because I'm not able to practice as much as I would like, I can't get my mind to lock onto what body ratio's I like, so I made the spreadsheet and make the character morphs so that I wouldn't have to rely on my own brain, same with using Inkscape, using that so I don't have to rely on my ability to draw lines by hand.
This stuff only happen in the past few month, figuring out my style, and I mostly just have tests, nothing much to show, but that's because I'm moving back to programming for the time being.
