Style exploration

I recently took Tom Froese’s new class on Skillshare, The Style Class: Work Out Your Illustration Style in a Daily Project. (If you don’t already subscribe to Skillshare, you can try it for 14 days free with this link.)

This involved doing a daily drawing, using the alphabet to keep you going, and picking a theme. I picked ‘everyday life’ which, in hindsight, may have been a little too open, but then I do especially love drawing lifestyle pieces of various kinds (see the Lifestyle section on my portfolio, for example), so it may have been the right thing to choose. Having the A to Z as the framework really helped me keep up – I have tried so many times to do a daily project and almost always fall down after a week or two, but I didn’t this time. (Though I did end up two days late, having missed a couple of days – one because I was on a very long walk and another because I didn’t feel well and ended up going to bed at 5pm. I don’t mind this so much, though – it’s the giving up completely that I didn’t want.)

Here is a collation of them all:

If you like process videos, I posted quite a lot on Instagram.

Things I learnt… 

1. If I’m going to do a daily drawing project, I need to pick simpler things as some of these took me hours! (Not that I didn’t love those hours, but I do have some limits to time.) So, I have already started another A to Z, this time of fruit and veg and just drawing one piece of each per day (except… I’m already thinking that maybe there should be 2–3 examples of each one on each day, which still wouldn’t take a huge amount of time, but gives more variety and, frankly, more interest for the actual drawing), but also doing a weekly room/scene that I will take my time taking from sketch to final, so I can dig into the detail more.

2. Texture is not (currently – I know that style evolves and that this may change) for me (except for texture from mark-making and pattern). Some of the earlier ones had me going for it with the Procreate brushes and, while there is nothing wrong with them, as such, they don’t feel as much like me. 

3. I do love drawing rooms and scenes (e.g. R is for reading, K is for kitchen, A is for attic, L is for laundry…) and adding little details, but they take TIME! 

4. I also love list-style pieces – e.g. T is for tea, U is for underwear, V is for vitamins… 

5. I really do need to work on nailing a style and technique for drawing people. And that is already on my list of areas to work on this year (drawing people and learning more about how to animate my illustrations are my focuses for the first quarter of the year, at least). 

6. Colour is a big thing for me and I love making colourful pieces and having a colourful portfolio and Insta feed. 

7. I don’t use much line, but I did actually really love the O is for oranges, where I needed to add some fine lines to the outlines of the oranges to separate them in the bowl. I think I’d like to explore adding more fine lines here and there going forward, so we’ll see how that progresses.

8. Symmetry and pattern – it’s fun to add some of this to an individual piece (e.g. I is for ink and M is for marmite) and allows me to incorporate pattern a bit more. And, if you know my work at all, you’ll know I LOVE symmetry! (For my next A to Z I’m planning to use the pieces to make patterns, though. Initially some very simple ones and then possibly some mixed tossed patterns with a bunch of them.) 

9. Not sure I’ve quite nailed a style for the writing, yet, so need to work on developing that, as well. I tend to mix it up quite a bit and would be good to be a bit more consistent (even if I end up with two or three different writing styles, so I can still mix it up somewhat). Actually, I like the I is for Ink and G is for Gin text the best, where there’s a mix of thicker block capitals and lower-case cursive. Maybe that’s the direction to try to go in first.

This was such a fun project and I highly recommend it for helping you work out, or confirm, your style – or even just to giver you something to draw, if you don’t always know what to draw next!

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