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

Hello my sweet friends!

I've been seeing some beautiful sketchbook pages from activity one for this month's illustration club with so many cozy scenes ❤ It's of course not too late to join in on that activity, you can find the post for it here.

It's time for activity two for this month which is exploring compositions. Now that we've had a brainstorming session to jot down ideas relating to our prompt (which this month is 'a cozy home'), we can start refining some of those ideas into composition thumbnails that we can use for our final illustration. Your sketches might have been developed enough to not need this stage, but I still quite enjoy it 😊

I often do an activity like this when I'm sketching for a prompt because (for me at least) it's usually not the first composition idea that I like the most, so it's nice to take some time to develop 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 little reminder, here’s what I drew for last week’s activity and I'll be using some of the ideas I sketched on this page to develop some basic compositions:

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

I'm not sure why I ended up drawing them so spread out across my page this time, but I drew three composition ideas for my cozy home drawing (three seems to be the number I often end up with!).

I started with sketch 1 expanding on the idea of having a happy cat relaxing in a cozy space, so I drew them next to a window with some nice homey elements around like a picture frame and some plants. I also thought it would be fun to add the little mouse as if the cat and mouse were friends and relaxing together by the window. You'll see that I used the rule of thirds to lay out my elements; the window and the cat both fall on thirds.

For sketch 2 I wanted to do a simple home exterior with a centred composition. Often when I do a composition with something big and symmetrical in the centre, I make sure there's an element that's asymmetrical (like the smoke in this one), because I don't want the whole composition to be a mirror. I like the simplicity of compositions like this and they can make for really bold illustrations.

And then for sketch 3 I really wanted to make a miniature home so I built a little living room around a mug of tea. To make it clear that someone (or something) is living there I put up some laundry, a rug and a couch, and to show that it's small I have the mug and a cake. I wonder if I should turn the cake into a piece of cheese instead?

I'm leaning towards drawing sketch 1 for my final illustration, but I'm not sure yet! 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! ❤