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

Hello my lovely flowers! 🌷

Before we jump into the second activity for this month's illustration club I wanted to let you all know that my new brush pack will be released this weekend AND I've given all Beautiful Bluebells early access to the brush pack (for no additional cost to the usual membership, yay)!

They'll only be on Patreon until this Saturday 13th so if you'd like to get your hands on my second brush pack then be sure to download them if you're a Beautiful Bluebell, or upgrade your membership if you're in another tier and would like access 🥰✨🌷

So excited to be sharing them with you!

Now I want to show you the compositions that I've drawn for our illustration club.

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 cute party'), 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 drew something quite simple and familiar with a worm and snail together, with lots of confetti and a little cake! I like these two in party hats but I wonder if this composition is too similar to other ones that I've drawn before.

Sketch 2 is more complex because I wanted one of these options to be a full scene. I really like the little picnic and the mushroom house!

I was inspired for sketch 3 by the slice of cake and since I had worms on the mind I decided to draw one sticking out the top. I think this is my favourite idea and would be soo cute to draw as a final illustration.

Let me know which one you like best!

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! ❤