Good Day Friends!!
As an artist, creating an illustration process is key.
Imagine this:
It’s a wonderful, sunny morning. You look out the window as you stretch and get excited about sitting down at your drawing table. You get your supplies, prepare your area and you’re all ready to get started. Except you have no worldly idea what to draw! Or even worse, you know exactly what you want to draw and have no idea where to start or how to do it.
I’ve been smacked in the side of the face with both situations more times than I can count. So how, you ask, do you move past this brick wall and run merrily through the field of your creativity? It’s simpler than you think. Take a moment to establish an illustration or drawing process that works for you.
In the spirit of sharing, I wanted to share with you my process of planning and working on an illustration from start to finish.
How to Fix What Should I Drawitis
You’re ready to go, you’ve even cleared your schedule. You’re prepped and comfortable and you have absolutely nothing. No idea. I’m going to offer you a few quick ideas on how to get your arty brain juices flowing so you don’t spend all of your drawing time in an 8 hour Pinterest hole.
Use a Random Prompt Generator
Random prompt generators are the perfect, mindless solution to this problem. If you truly got nothing, let a robot solve it for you! There are plenty of random prompt generators online you could play with. One of my personal favorites is Jazza’s Arty Games. It’s an app that generates all kinds of crazy ideas. You can set parameters depending on your preferences, do time challenges, or even add your own list of ideas and let it make some mash-ups for you.
Join an Art Challenge
There are plenty of art challenges floating around the web. Jump in on Inktober or Mermay. Challenge yourself to make an illustration a day. You can actively participate, use old prompt lists to get started or create your own. Set some rules for yourself. Try only drawing turtles for 30 days. How can you make each drawing unique and compelling? Sometimes limits seriously help your creativity thrive.
Create a Giant Project
This was my chosen path. I absolutely hate trying to pull an idea out of nowhere when I’m not feeling it. So I created a giant art project for myself. I put all of the ideas from my old drawings, sketchbooks, post-its, and phone notes into a folder. I numbered them and put the numbers into a cute little jar. Now, when it’s time to start a new piece I just pull a number and use that idea as my prompt!
I want to add a few disclaimers to this method. While I do have a jar full of enough pretty cool ideas to get me through a good couple of years of my life, that doesn’t mean new and exciting ones won’t pop up from time to time. It’s okay to go with the flow. Don’t feel like you have to complete every idea in the jar before you’re allowed to have new ones. The idea is to keep the creativity flowing like the Nile.
Dress Up Your Idea
I find that even when I have a solid prompt or idea, I like to challenge myself to go outside of the box. I love asking myself and the people around me “But how can I make this weirder?” When people start responding with something along the lines of “F***ing seriously?” I know I hit the mark.
Sometimes this bit is easy & sometimes it takes a few weeks to bring the idea to the level I want. If it’s on the taking forever train, I try to work on something else in the meantime.
Sketch, Sketch, Sketch Again
This is where the going gets tough. You have the idea, it’s as weird as possible. Now you have to make it work. Get out your sketchbook and play with composition. I like to do a bunch of, admittedly terrible, thumbnail sketches to work through different versions of the composition. When I get a couple I like, I do a bigger sketch with a few more details and narrow it down from there. Sometimes you really have to consider something ridiculous like “How big is this cyborg as compared to the giant flying goldfish machines?”
I also like to write notes around my sketches. If I have some ideas about color, sizing, texture, etc. I jot it down in the margins. That way, when I’m ready to start illustrating, I know exactly where I’m going. (Until I don’t, but we’ll get to that later.)
Create a Photoshop Composite
Reference design meeting with Chico.
This step was inspired by one of my favorite artists, Morgan Davidson. I used to try to figure out my layout and proportions while I was penciling the final piece, but that ended up with A LOT of erasing and frustration. Talk about spending an hour meticulously drawing a big flower to find out later, you actually need it to be an inch smaller so you have to start over. NO!
That experience taught me to invest some time in preproduction. I use Pinterest and other stock sites to curate some images for a mood board or royalty-free images if I need a direct reference of an animal or item. I then use Photoshop to create a reference photo collage that lays everything out exactly where I want it. The magic of Photoshop is if that aforementioned flower needs to be an inch bigger, it’s only a click away. The end result is one reference photo that I can work from when creating the final illustration.
Pencil Out the Illustration
This would normally be the super scary first mark on the white paper step. But since you did all that preproduction work, it’s no problem at all! Depending on how challenging I made the composite I tackle this in two different ways. If it’s easy, I use my reference photo and wing it. If I made myself a super challenge, I do this often, I use the grid method to make sure everything is landing in the exact right place. Since my work relies heavily on linework, I pencil everything I want to line. I might add a few details that I don’t plan on inking, but I usually try not to.
Inking
This could be the most intimidating step, but don’t forget about all the work you did to make this run smoothly. I won’t lie to you and tell you I haven’t gotten here, sneezed on the last line, and had to start over. But I will tell you that all of the preproduction allows you to be way more confident with your linework.
I’ll eventually create a whole post on my inking process, but for now, I’ll drop you a few tips. My favorite pens to ink with are Sakura Micron Pens. They come in different sizes which will allow you to vary your line weight and they’re pretty good at producing smooth consistent lines. I like to put the thickest lines on my main subject and use thinner lines for background details. If I’m leaning more towards realism, I prefer to use the thinnest pen because the linework tends to disappear into the coloring.
Floating Away by Kailey Lauren Kay
Coloring
If you’ve made it to this point, you’ll realize what you’re looking at is a coloring page. You’ve probably been crushing the coloring game since you were old enough to hold a crayon so from this point on, it’s no sweat. Well… maybe a bit of sweat. But seriously, you’ve got this.
Color the Background
I HATE backgrounds. I’ve always been better at items than backgrounds so I used to save them for last. Then I’d get all the way through the drawing and have this huge white zone I didn’t know what to do with. Now I do it first and let everything else flow from there. This works for me for two reasons. It lets me use the lighting from the background to accurately color the items and then the big scary part, for me, gets done first, most of the paper is covered and I can breathe and relax for the rest of the drawing.
Have you come up with an idea you’re in love with? Have you gotten all the way to this step only to realize you have no idea how to make your medium do that? Yep, yep. Me too! Especially background textures. This is the moment to pull out a separate piece of paper and test ideas until you figure it out. If you have to scan and make some copies of your linework, do it! You’ll thank yourself when you have a tried and true method to bring to the final drawing.
Color the Hardest Part
For me, the background is often the hardest part. If you’re dreading taking on the portrait, animal, or machinery in your piece, just do that first! If you crush it, you’ll be calm for the rest of your drawing. If you stuff it up, you won’t have dedicated an obscene amount of hours when you ultimately have to start over. I even sign my name before I start coloring because I’m always afraid I’ll do a terrible job with my signature and ruin the piece.
Color Everything Else
If you’ve gotten here, the rest is cake. Enjoy the ride and have fun! That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?
That’s a wrap! I’ve taken you on a lovely walkthrough of my illustration process from ideation to coloring! Hopefully, you’ve picked up an idea or two along the way. Maybe you’ve just gotten to know me a little better. Every person and every artist is different, so go out and create a drawing process that works for you. I’d love to hear more about yours in the comments!
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