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

Hello my lovelies!

I hope you've been enjoying filling your sketchbook pages with lovely ideas for activity 1 (and it's of course not too late if you hadn't had a chance yet, join in whenever suits you!), I always love seeing all of the creative ideas you come up with!

It's time to share with you activity 2 for this month which once again is exploring compositions. Now that we have a sketchbook page filled with lots of fun ideas relating to our prompt (which this month is 'a magical forest'), we can start refining some of those ideas into composition thumbnails that we can use for our final illustration.

I often do an activity like this when I'm sketching for a prompt because I find that often it's not the first composition that comes to my head that I like the most so it's nice when I have time to sketch out a few composition ideas and see what interests me most.

So have a look over the ideas that you came up with in activity 1, and think about which of those ideas stand out to you most and see if you can make a little scene out of them. Keep in mind what you want to be the focus of the scene, and how you can draw the viewer's eye there.

You can draw as many composition ideas 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 create a few thumbnail compositions in my sketchbook (but you could do these digitally if you like!) because I feel like I can be really loose when I'm drawing in pencil.

I ended up doing three composition ideas this time (like I said - there's no right or wrong amount but I find 3-5 to be a pretty good number) and I quite like how they all turned out!

I started out with sketch 1 exploring the idea of having a big tree for a house, and since it was going to be the focus of my composition and I wanted to be able to put lots of details on the tree I put it smack bang in the middle of my composition. I would likely add more flower details around the forest floor in my final illustration of this sketch, and maybe put a little critter in the window too!

For sketch 2 I wanted to draw the bunny and I combined them with the wizard hat and magic wand to make them a magical bunny. I drew a few plants and bushes directly behind them, and since I wasn't doing a full background scene I put them in a round frame rather than the square one I often do.

And for sketch 3 I wanted to explore the magical bunny further but this time have them in a full environment, so I centred them in a forest scene. They're picking up flowers to put in their little basket (so cute!) and to make it extra whimsical I put a rainbow in the background.

In each of these ideas I'd probably put lots of sparkly stars in the final illustration version of them just to really add some magic.

I'm not 100% sure which one I'll draw for my final illustration, but I think it's between sketch 2 and sketch 3. What do you think?

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. And if you'd like to jump straight into creating your final illustration, feel free to go ahead! ❤