How do I develop my own sculptural style instead of copying what I see?

This is where observation becomes everything. You don't find your voice by trying to invent something completely new—you find it by paying attention to what genuinely arrests you, what you return to, what makes you look twice. I encourage sculptors to keep a practice journal. Not a sketchbook necessarily—notes on proportion, materials that surprised you, the way light fell on something, spatial relationships you noticed walking through a city. This becomes your visual vocabulary, the language that's actually yours. Then make work that feels small and specific. Don't aim for important pieces. Make studies about one thing: how negative space feels, what happens when you repeat a form, how two materials speak to each other. Your style emerges not from grand gestures but from persistent, curious exploration of what interests you. Copy deliberately too—spend time understanding why a sculptor you admire made a choice. Then consciously make the opposite choice. Constraint and deliberate limitation teach you your own preferences faster than trying everything. Your style is what remains when you strip away what you thought sculpture should be. It lives in your particular way of seeing, your specific obsessions, your material intuitions. Trust the small observations. They're where the real work happens.