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

Hello my lovelies!

If you saw my last post you'll know that I was feeling pretty under the weather with a cold at the end of last week and spent all weekend recovering and I feel soo much better now! It's amazing what a couple of Disney movies, lots of sleep and a restful weekend can do.

I was still feeling foggy yesterday but am back at my computer today with lots of energy, so I drew up some compositions for activity two of this month's illustration club ✨🐟

There are some really cute under the sea sketchbook pages over on Discord with quite a few octopus and jellyfish so I'm really enjoying seeing those!

So activity two for the club is all about exploring compositions. Feel free to skip this explainer if you already know all about it!

Now that we've had a brainstorming session to jot down ideas relating to our prompt (which this month is 'under the sea'), 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 see what compositions I came up with:

So I drew three compositions based on some of the characters and scenes I brainstormed in the first activity.

For sketch 1 I wanted to explore the jellyfish character in a really simple composition where overall they're smack bang in the centre, but with their face in the top left third. I gave them a snorkel just to add some character and I wanted a scene around them but nothing too complicated so I've just suggested the scene with some seaweed framing around the outside of the composition.

I really like how sketch 2 turned out - I wanted to have a sandcastle but in quite a beautiful setting with lots of depth (sort of like how I would normally draw a cottage). The horizon line follows the line of the first horizontal third, and I've got the sandcastle at the intersection of the bottom right thirds. Also, having the sunshine sort of looking down toward the castle helps draw our eye there because we want to see what they're looking at. I think it would make a super cute illustration and I could even add a little crab to live in the sandcastle!

And then for sketch 3 I wanted to have fun with the fish with big lips so I've got two fish kissing right in the middle of frame horizontally. I also wanted to explore with this one a more developed environment so I drew a coral reef down the bottom with some critters and lots of pretty plants. The idea of this one makes me smile!

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! ❤