I just came out of a weekend-long challenge where I tried to use all the free time I could find to sketch 80+ images to accompany all the posts on this blog. This wasn’t exactly easy for a few reasons:
- I’m not a trained artist or illustrator, so my drawings are very amateur-ish and I’m only beginning to figure out my style.
- I only started digital drawing last week so there was a slight learning curve with the technology.
- Going all the way back through my blog catalog was also a very distracting process — kind of like trying to clean your room but stopping every 2 minutes to examine one of the items you come across, so it took much longer than it should have.
Still, I did it! It was actually a very therapeutic and clarifying process. Therapeutic because I was taking my time to discover and learn new sketching techniques and style while not having any expectation whatsoever for the output quality. It’s my own blog after all. Clarifying because I had several moments of reflecting on what I wrote, why I wrote certain things, and how I can best visually capture the essence of my writing. I also had the chance to think through and test out different art styles, which helps refine my visual preferences further.
Here are a few things I want to document about this process:
Initial planning and design style: I knew I wanted to use vibrant colors with some retro, grainy feel to it. I liked clean, minimal graphics but not overly geometric or rigid. I eventually relied quite a lot on simple shapes for time efficiency and easy execution (I’m a beginner illustrator after all!), but I think my initial vision and final outputs align quite well. Most of the sketches I did don’t incorporate multiple colors, but I’ve also tried mixing in color contrast and using some textures for variety. I’d definitely want to play around with more dimensions and textures in future sketches.
Technology: I jumped at this challenge because I recently got myself a tablet and wanted to use it towards my hobbies (blogging, art & design). I purchased Procreate and did a 1-hour crash course on YouTube to understand the software. I was quite driven to learn all the “shortcuts” in the software early on, because I wanted this to be a pragmatic way to create accompanying visuals for my ideas and writing, not just a practice of self-expression on its own. The quicker I can get my ideas on a sketchbook (tablet) the better.
Digital drawing is also such an effective medium for my needs because I’ve had experience with graphic design before. Layers and adjustment tools are very intuitive. Even the app interface feels familiar to me. I think both the medium and the particular software have helped me get through this art challenge so smoothly.
Ideation and choosing the subject to draw: This was as challenging as the actual drawing, though I had thought it would come to me more naturally. It’s difficult in the same way choosing the title of your blog post is. You want the title and featured photo to be eye-catching but also precise and in line with the content contained in the post. Picking the right thing to draw wasn’t easy for many of my blog entries, given that I write about very abstract subjects sometimes. What actually helped was also referring to the stock photos I previously used as featured photos. I knew that there had already been a thinking process behind choosing each of these photos, and as long as I can still see the connection, I draw direct inspiration from these stock images.
For my skill level, it wasn’t always easy to draw the chosen subject well. I opted to reuse the same motif and subject several times, not only because some are recurring themes in my blog (books, learning, planet Earth), but also because they are more familiar to draw.
Time: After being very meticulous with a few first sketches, I got increasingly impatient (and perhaps also more skilled), so I took much less time with the later pieces. As I said, being quick and efficient in the app interface was important for me. It wasn’t that I was stressed by time. In fact, in sketching more quickly and seamlessly, I evaded my perfectionist tendency and became much more carefree with the process. Sometimes a bit of a time constraint could actually open up your mind more.
From ideas to results: I have to say some of the sketches turned out better than I expected while most of them were just, frankly, space fillers. I’ve also left out a bunch of bad sketches which I attempted but couldn’t quite achieve the result I anticipated. I certainly will come back to revise some of the final uploaded sketches, either because I’ve come up with other ideas to visualize the subject much better, or because I can do a better job now sketching the same thing.
My future process: After doing more or less the same process many times for the past few days, I have now become quite comfortable navigating the app and using my limited toolbox. There is room for experimentation and playing around, but I know that at least for the blog graphics, I’m happy to go off on my existing process to save time and brain energy. Just like with writing, the less friction I have in creating my output, the more likely it gets done and published. So I’ll recycle my color palette, my sketch pens, my canvas settings, and occasionally, my sketch subjects. I will get to be creative but not labored and resistant in this process.