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

Hello my beautiful flowers!

It's time for the second activity for this month's illustration club in the lead up to creating a final illustration by the end of the month. There are some really, really sweet sketchbook pages on the Discord community from last week's activity, and feel free to add yours there if you haven't already!

Activity two for the club is all about exploring compositions. Now that we've had a brainstorming session to jot down ideas relating to our prompt (which this month is 'best friends'), 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 😊

To explore some composition ideas in this activity, 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 as a composition. 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 little 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 drew three little compositions based on ideas I sketched out in the first activity.

For sketch 1 I wanted to develop the idea of the snail and slug from the previous page just a little bit because I really liked how they look together. I actually was pretty happy with how I had drawn them the first time so I just extended the rainbow into a circle shape so they could be on some green grass.

Sketch 2 combines the little worm and ladybug with the happy sunshine and clouds so that the whole scene is full of happy faces! Once I colour everything in and have some rolling hills in the background I think this one could be a really sweet scene.

And for sketch 3 I changed idea of the mug best friends a little to instead be a mug full of happy marshmallow friends. It's a little hard to tell from the sketch but I have marshmallows in the top having a nice time together. I wanted to add an option that didn't have two separate characters standing together like I did for the first sketch, so that's why I adjusted it.

I think I enjoy the first two compositions the most. I like the simplicity of the first idea but also think the second one could make a really cute scene. What do you think?

So, 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! ❤