Hi there,
This week we thought we would take a dive into some of our sketchbook work, sharing with you some of our process when creating illustrations. From the initial first ideas to sketches and drafts to experimenting with colour and light, our illustration process takes many forms.
When we first start an illustration we usually start sketching ideas up in a sketch book, these sketches are often quite rough at this stage. We find this process invaluable in getting our initial ideas out and exploring how a character our scene should look. Often we would also use our sketchbook as a place to try out different textures and colours, which helps us get an overall feel for the look of the illustration. Also sketchbooks are a great place to play and have fun with mark making and it doesn’t matter if it's a bit messy, it’s a great place to explore and produce vibrant and interesting illustrations.
Here’s an initial sketch of an Autumn scene we worked on recently. We find it helpful to keep the line work quite loose as it helps us create a sense of movement and light.
We often start with colouring the characters first as this helps us get a sense of what the scene will be like and we can think about how the characters can stand out from their background.
Here’s a fun sketch of some foodie Christmas characters, we love playing around with their expressions and posture.
Here’s some colour experiments in our sketchbook. We use a variety of mediums to create our illustrations, gouache is one of our favourites.
These colourful plants are created in a variety of different mediums, creating bold textures and colour.
As you can see we have used some of the lovely plants and foliage from the above textures to build up this illustration.
