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

Hello my beautiful flowers!

Although I haven't been to a golden sandy beach in quite a while, I really enjoyed pretending that I was at the beach for this activity and brainstorming ideas for a beach day ☀️🏖️🩴

So, let's get started with the second activity for this month's illustration club and draw some composition ideas!

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 'Beach Day!'), 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 wanted to warm up with something quite simple and really liked the idea of drawing a seagull, so I drew their face in the middle(ish) and gave them a nice sun hat and glasses. The background is super simple and they have a nice refreshing drink 😄

For Sketch 2 I wanted to draw something with the starfish and thought it would be cute if they had a friend that they were relaxing with. I drew them from a top-down view with some beachy things around them like a book, shells, and a bucket.

I definitely wanted to draw a sandcastle in one of my composition ideas so for sketch 3 I drew a simple composition of a sandcastle in the middle with two little bunny characters adding flags to the top of it.

Which one do you like best? I think I like the second and third one the most but I can't decide which one to draw as a final illustration!

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! ❤