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

Hello again!

I've just drawn out my composition ideas for this month's illustration club and wanted to share them with you! I've accidentally gone quite animal themed because I've just realised that all three of my ideas have animals in them 😄

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 'a quiet coffee break'), 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 these are the composition ideas that I came up with:

For sketch 1 I took the sleepy kitty that I drew on the previous page and combined them with doing some art. It felt relaxing to me to have a scene where an artist might be sitting down with their coffee to do some drawing and their cat joining them 😊

Sketch 2 I think is my favourite, I was thinking about different styles of mugs that I could draw and thought of a teacup and then thought about what kind of animal might enjoy having a break in the teacup - so that's why I drew a frog! I was going to draw their limbs sticking out but I decided that their head just being half submerged made it look like they were really enjoying having a soak.

And then for sketch 3 I wanted to explore seeing a character having a coffee break in the armchair that I drew in activity 1. Since I saw a bunny in my garden yesterday I drew a bunny for my happy character 🐰

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! ❤