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

Hello Illustration Club family!

It’s time for activity number 3 for this month and this activity is all about creating a final illustration!

The prompt for this month is ‘a sunny afternoon’, and we’ve already filled a sketchbook page with any ideas relating to the prompt that came to mind, then we explored some composition sketches from those ideas, and now we can take one of those sketches and create a final illustration from it.

You can create your final illustration in any medium you like, and whether you spend 30 minutes or half a day on it is totally up to you and how developed you want it to be - there are no rules! The aim of this activity is to have fun and practise our art skills, so if you can achieve those two things then the activity is a success whether the final illustration turns out how you wanted it to or not 🥰

Hopefully the previous two activities have given you confidence and a starting point to create a final illustration for the prompt of the month.

So I’ll show you what I created for this activity based on a sketch from activity 2!

This is my final illustration for ‘a sunny afternoon’, and I’ve interpreted the prompt less literally (I didn’t actually include the sun) but the scene is the kind of thing that might be happening on a sunny afternoon. It’s simple and bold and I quite like it!

Here is a little snapshot of my drawing process and also the colour palette I used (you're welcome to use it as well if you like!), and if you’re a Beautiful Bluebell then you’ll have a 20 minute video coming shortly where I’ll talk you through what I did and why.

The basic process for this illustration went a little something like this:

First I drew the sketch again in my digital drawing software (I used Photoshop) and I made a few changes from the pencil version like swapping out the butterfly for a ladybug.

I reduced my sketch to 20% opacity and made it multiply blend mode so I would always be able to reference it on top of the other layers

Then I drew in my background and coloured all of the major elements in a flat colour to get the shapes down

I then gave my strawberries some little faces and rosy cheeks (very important for my style!)

Then I gave everything a broad pass of texture and shading, focusing on making the leaves and stalks darker at the bottom

I also added some fine line details like the pattern and spots on the leaves

And that was about it!

Now it's your turn - take one of the composition sketches you drew in activity 2 and use that as a guide to draw a more developed illustration in colour. Or if you didn't join activity 2 and you're confident enough to jump straight into drawing an illustration from the prompt then you can do that too!

All of the illustration club activities replicate my normal art process where I explore some loose ideas, refine them to a composition and then create a final illustration, so if you’re joining the club this month I hope you enjoy the process as much as I do!

If you do draw a final illustration with the prompt this month then feel free to share it with us over on Discord in the #final-illustrations channel. Everyone is welcome, and you can share what you've created for any of the activities at any time!

I’m looking forward to seeing what you all create, and I’ll be posting this drawing to Instagram soon (feel free to share yours on social media as well).❤