How to Get Started With Illustration Even If You Cannot Draw
Hello everyone! I’m Posty, the brainchild of User Experience Society (UXSoc). Two weeks ago, I asked members of UXSoc if there were any questions they wanted to ask me! For this article, I decided to answer an anonymous member’s question about illustration. A lot wanted to learn more about illustration, so I wrote an article dedicated for it!
“I’m very interested in doing illustrations but I’m bad at drawing. How do I start?”
Have you ever felt that you’ll never go beyond drawing stick figures? No matter how hard you try, drawing just isn’t for you. You marvel at the works of talented illustrators. You often wonder how they could have created such masterpieces.
Feeling inspired, you start illustrating too. You grab a pencil and a piece of paper. You draw your first few strokes, but you end up dissatisfied. You give up. Perhaps you’re not talented enough to illustrate.
Wrong. It’s not about whether you’re born gifted or not. In fact, illustration can be learned, and the rate at how fast you will improve — from being a stick figure specialist to an illustration superstar — will depend on how you practice.
In this article, I’ve listed down four ways on how to get started with illustration even if you cannot draw.
Draw 20 hands a day to master shape, form, and proportion ✋
Hans Bacher, an Annie-award winning production designer for Disney’s Mulan, once said that if you want to draw anything well, you must draw 20 hands a day. Hands are the most difficult subjects to draw because they are made up of many bones and muscles. They are also geometrically complex to render. What adds to the difficulty is that hands perform a variety of actions.
When drawing hands, rendering them from life is preferred over copying a picture (Your hand is your best reference!). By drawing from life, you will be trained to perceive objects in their three-dimensional nature. That way, you will become more sensitive to judging distance, perspective, and spatial relationships among objects.
When drawing hands, it is recommended that you keep and number your sketches on a blank journal. Doing so helps you monitor your progress over time. Another good practice is to simplify the complexity of the hands by breaking them down into basic shapes.
Draw in your journal every day 📔
Drawing may seem daunting to you at first because of the complexity of the strokes and hand movements that you have to make. The good news is that drawing is a motor skill and can be developed through practice. The more frequently you practice, the faster complex skills become second nature to you. You can train yourself to practice more frequently by drawing on your journal.
Filling three pages of your journal with drawings every day is a good habit to make. It also helps if you include the date on your journal to keep track of your progress. You don’t have to make all your drawing perfect. In fact, scribbles and rough sketches are fine!
Now, the brand does not matter when choosing a journal. While having a nice expensive journal feels great, documenting and compiling your work is much more important. It’s quite nice to be practical! Drawing on a cheap journal will probably make you less conscious to draw since you’re not wasting any expensive pages!
Study works of illustrators that you like by copying them ✍️
While copying other people’s illustrations and declaring them your own are a no-no, copying them for practice is acceptable. In fact, Renaissance apprentices learned by copying the works of their masters.
While this is true, copying is only effective when you actively analyze as you illustrate. As you copy, think about how the illustrator went about creating his or her work. Observe the colors and textures used. Study how visual elements are composed and how they relate to one another. Think about the message the illustrator is trying to convey and how he or she communicated it visually.
By copying, you are not only deconstructing an illustrator’s process, but you are also studying the different factors that make an illustration work. Some illustrators whose works you can refer to are the following:
- Lisk Feng — for her use of color
- Malika Favre — for her geometric rendering of forms
- Celine Kim — for her technique on composition and perspective
- Yukai Du — for her dynamic illustrations and use of texture
- Gizem Vural — for her abstract pieces
Speed up your improvement by looking for a mentor 👩🏫
Although you can always be self-taught, improvement speed up tenfold with a mentor. In fact, mentors can point out things you have overlooked in your work. They also set you in the right path for growth. Our friend, Alexis, has written an article about getting mentors here.
You can also sign up for drawing classes. I recommend attending Fernando Seña’s art workshops. Fernando Seña is known as the Father of Philippine Art Workshops and has decades of experience in art education. His classes are not only reasonably priced but also flexible when it comes to schedule.
A mentor doesn’t have to be a professional, though! If you have any friends who are talented in illustration, you can always ask them about their process or shadow them whenever they illustrate. This way, you can gather many different techniques and apply them in your own works!
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Thanks for reading! 😀
Posty the Post-it likes answering questions about design. He likes sticking around in his spare time.
