Exploring Illustration Styles
An attempt at enhancing everyday doodles
Earlier this year, I took on the challenge of breaking free from my usual way of sketching, by learning from different artists and emulating their style. This idea came to me one lazy afternoon, over a chai-conversation with @doodledish. Dish was musing about getting stuck at the doodle stage of the illustration workflow and about the struggles of going beyond initial sketches. I suggested taking one of her doodles and trying my hand at developing it further.
@doodledish is a natural illustrator. I observe (usually in awe) how easily she goes about making her self portraits. I can’t wait for the day I get to walk through a gallery full of her selfies! All credits to her for the original sketch which I have used in this exercise, and many thanks to her for the feedback during the entire process.
I started by tracing out the original sketch. This made the base image for the explorations that followed. In retrospect, setting up the base image was a great idea. It helped me stick to style exploration and in making sure I kept away from blindly copying the references I was using.
To make this fun for myself I chose 1) to break away from my default method of drawing human figures and faces, as I learnt to in design school about fifteen years go and 2) to learn a new tool — Procreate for the iPad.
This piece by Pia Alizé Hazarika was my first reference and a more than challenging target for what I aimed to achieve with this exercise. The results of the first exploration got me excited about trying the same with other styles as well.
I picked the artists and the reference illustrations at random. Some were discovered on the same day I drew them and some were a part of my instagram feed. Some of these artists I had met in person and some have been an inspiration for several years. Sketching these styles felt new to me and some of them took a few attempts to get right. I gradually added to this collection over the course of the 5–6 weeks, mostly during my evenings after work.
I intended on finding a way of taking doodles to the next level. I succeeded with some and I struggled with some. But I learnt something new through all the explorations, and had fun in the process 🙂
Here is the final result:
I would love to hear about similar explorations you have done and how it has helped you. And any suggestions for how to take such explorations forward are very welcomed.
Here is the time-lapse of the entire process:
References
This is a list of artists I have use as a reference in this exercise:
