Mimi's Illustration Club March - Second Activity! (Patreon)

Hello my lovelies!

I hope you enjoyed the first illustration club activity last week, it’s been really lovely seeing you share your own sketchbook pages on Discord, so keep sharing them throughout the month as you join in!

It’s time for activity 2 of the illustration club for this month and this activity is all about exploring compositions. Now that we’ve filled a sketchbook page with ideas in the first activity, we can start taking some of those ideas and playing around with different compositions with them.

We'll take some time to draw in our sketchbooks or digital drawing software some small, simple composition sketches for this month’s prompt ‘a sunny afternoon’, and we can use the ideas you drew in last week’s activity. Think about how those ideas could make little scenes, or interesting interactions.

You can draw as many as you like, I think that 3-5 is a good number unless you have lots of ideas flowing! And they can also be really simple, don’t feel like you need to make a masterpiece here.

The aim is to end this activity with at least one sketch that you’d be happy to use for the final illustration for this month’s club.

How do we make an interesting composition?

There are lots of things you could consider for an interesting composition but it also doesn’t have to be complicated. If you’re a Beautiful Bluebell you can watch a lesson video about How To Make An Interesting Composition here.  

The basics are:

Have A Focal Point - Where do you want to draw the viewer’s attention and how can you make that stand out?

Create balance - Be mindful of having too many things weighted to one area to avoid the composition being off balance

Foreground, midground and background - If you think your composition is feeling a bit flat, consider adding some foreground or background elements to it

Rule of thirds - Splitting your composition into thirds and drawing your main elements along one of those lines or at their intersections can be a simple way to make your composition more interesting

So as a reminder, here’s what I drew for last week’s activity and I'll be taking ideas from here to develop a little more into my composition sketches:

And now let’s look at what I created for this activity

I wanted to draw my thumbnail sketches in my sketchbook so I could be casual and loose with them and here’s what I drew:

I did four sketches, and I actually like all of them and will probably turn a lot of them into full illustrations at some point!

I started out with sketch 1 and wanted to start simple and easy so I combined the happy sunshine looking over some simple flowers. This is a really simple idea but by adding faces to them suddenly they all have a little character and personality and there’s now an interaction between them.

For sketch 2 I was keen to do something with the bird in the hat from last week’s page so I combined them with the refreshing drink, and then that made me think of a picnic so I expanded the scene to be the bird having a picnic with a friend. For their friend I picked another little critter you’d be likely to find in the garden so I drew a snail, and also because snails are surprisingly cute and fun to draw!

Sketch 3 is based on the strawberries I drew last week and they’re such a sunny, summery fruit. I thought it would be nice to have them growing and again I gave them faces so that they would have some personality. I want them to be big and bold in the composition, and then I added a little butterfly to interact with them.

And then for sketch 4 I wanted to do something different in a circle frame and was inspired by the strawberries to draw a blackberry plant (also we have blackberries growing in the garden at the moment!). 

I tried to vary the compositions so that I didn’t create them all the same, and I think I ended up with a fairly nice mix of some simple and some more complex drawings. For the final illustration next week I think I’m going to draw sketch 3 because it’s quite simple and fun.

Notice how not all of these sketches are literally ‘a sunny afternoon’ but you can still see how they all came about from the prompt, so feel free to get as creative as you like with your interpretation!

Now it’s your turn - sketch out a few thumbnail compositions as options for a final illustration, and if you like you can share them with us over on Discord in the channel #exploring-compositions. Don't worry too much about making them too detailed or developed, we can focus on that next week ❤