When you draw an animal character, do you draw in solid geometric shapes with clean lines, or do you draw fur in individual lines? Or maybe you just draw with a wobbly line, an irregular shape?
How about human characters, how do you draw hair? Is it a mass of scribbles, or a solid mass of colour with a few texture lines?
Shapes, motifs and patterns are all part of your visual language. For me, if I can squeeze a few triangles in, I will. If I can get some nice irregular dots in too, like stars in a night sky, I do it. If I can get a white rabbit in, great. All of this stuff comes naturally now.
I like the way those shapes look and interact with each other.
The flowers I draw are almost always geometric, but sometimes I’ll add a really overly detailed one in amongst my little uniform blooms.
Trees vary depending on the age group I’m illustrating for but they usually involve intricate lines and patterns. I only know this about myself because of experimentation and a bit of basic analysis. If you don’t experiment and analyse, you won’t develop your own thoughts on what you find pleasing to draw. You won’t develop your own unique combinations that will turn a client’s head and prove to them that you know yourself well enough artistically to be able to take a project from start to finish without continuity issues.
Let’s say you enjoy drawing forest scenes and that’s all you have in your portfolio, but there’s a client that really wants to work with you on a book about stars and planets. Do you understand your style well enough to be able to apply it to that setting? If you understand the visual language that you use, they will understand it too. It will be pretty obvious that you can get the job done. But if you don’t have a visual language, how will you translate your style from one setting to another?
Just small experiments with drawing basic shapes will help you to develop your shape language.
Basic experiments like drawing 12 boxes on a sheet of A4 and filling each one with a different pattern might help you to see what shapes you naturally find appealing.
————————- This weeks post is an excerpt from my booklet, ‘So, What’s Your Style?’ available from my Etsy store. It’s been a busy week illustrating my first Christmas book which will be published by Ladybird this October - I’ll post more about that soon, but let’s just say every second counts! I hope you enjoyed reading - please let me know!
May 7, 2022·edited May 7, 2022Liked by Maxine Lee-Mackie
Great point! I work in a strange way to get to my final illustrations, for a long time I though I needed to work in the way other professionals work to be a professional, but which professional should I emulate, things really started to go well for me in terms of style when eaned into my weird way of working instead of trying to be someone else….
Great point! I work in a strange way to get to my final illustrations, for a long time I though I needed to work in the way other professionals work to be a professional, but which professional should I emulate, things really started to go well for me in terms of style when eaned into my weird way of working instead of trying to be someone else….