Skillshare Lesson: "Create Small Illustrations with Big Impact"
One thing I enjoy doing in my spare time is learning new skills to grow as a designer & illustrator. I received a Wacom Intuos tablet this past Christmas and have been eager to use it - there’s a big learning curve from drawing with a mouse and even traditional pencil and paper. I often use Skillshare.com as a learning tool. The most recent workshop I’m doing is titled “Create Small Illustrations with Big Impact”. This was the perfect opportunity to practice using my new drawing tablet.
Below are my illustrations for a fictional article about “Tips from a Professional Dog Walker”. Each of the items I illustrated could be used as spot illustrations in said article.
https://www.skillshare.com/projects/252330
The following is the prompt, taken from the workshop.
Project Description
For the class project, we'll be creating two sets of stylistically and conceptually related Spot Illustrations. Spot illustrations are small, self-contained images that float in the layout of publications and websites. Their purpose is to highlight key ideas in a story or article and to create visually compelling entry points into the text. Like all illustrations, a spot illustration can be very simple and literal in concept, or they can be more conceptual, conveying an abstract idea rather than something tangible.
SETUP
As our starting point, we first need to come up with an overall direction for our illustrations. In a real world assignment, this would come from an art director, and would include how many illustrations, what size, and what they should be about. To simulate this, we'll need some way of coming up with such direction ourselves. To do this, follow these steps:
Setup Step 1: Choose a general theme.
Setup Step 2: Choose a specific experience related to your theme. Optional additional step: imagine a context/purpose of an article that might be about your theme and experience (e.g. a list of tips in a running magazine).
Setup Step 3: Write two lists of 4-6 items each related to your theme/experience as follows:
List A: Simple objects (nouns) related to your theme or experience
List B: Abstract ideas or situations related to your chosen experience.