Loosen up

What I've learned from my sketchbooks

It’s time for Illoguild question of the month and in October we’re discussing lessons we’ve learned in our illustration journey. In my two years of writing this Substack I’ve talked about different challenges and lessons I took from them and amongst those one stands out to me: trying to loosen up my style of digital illustration the way I draw in my sketchbooks.

Don’t get me wrong, I love drawing on my iPad and I still enjoy using lush colour palettes and getting lost in tiny details of elaborate illustrations but lately I’ve been trying to export a simpler, looser style of my pencil and pastel sketches into illustrations done with Procreate.

I’ve always admired artists who use loose watercolour textures and scribbly pencil lines in their illustrators and how they still manage to show every emotion and storytelling with reduced strokes and restricted colour palettes (like Isabelle Arsenault) or those who paint in traditional, mixed techniques first and then combine them with digital elements (like Devon Holzwarth).

Learning to loosen up

• I love random textures of messy watercolours and water soluble pastels so I bought some Procreate brushes that mimic wet wash really well and some textured overlays that give my flat digital drawings depth and texture of artistic paper. As I’m learning to add more and more randomness to my digital drawings with different brushes, I still like to enhance the illustration with a final application of textured overlay.

Difference between a flat image and added layer of texture

• I often sketch with coloured pencils, I love the way they scratch softly along the paper - after long hesitation I finally got Paperlike screen protector for my iPad and it was a game changer! No more click-clacking over slippery glass, drawing on the screen feels much softer and more deliberate.

• Another thing I needed to do was hold myself back from constantly correcting and over polishing every single stroke of Apple pencil, something that has become too easy with a simple “undo” command. One way to avoid this was to work faster, with less layers, not giving myself too much opportunity to go back and change every single detail. That way I’m still drawing digitally but with a working pace closer to drawing on paper.

• and finally I tried a simpler, “slimmed down” approach to my illustration, reducing the number of different brushes I use and restricting my colour palette - less choice means less overthinking and so far the results are quite surprising - I’ll definitely continue to experiment!

  

  Using a simple rough texture (left) and only two different brushes (right) trying to mimic sketchbook style drawing in Procreate.

Check out what other

illoguild

members have learned so far and read about the illustration tips they shared or catch our next free live Zoom on Monday, OCTOBER 21st at 8 AM Boston time, 1PM London time, when we’ll chat about “LESSONS LEARNED” .