Judith was gritting her teeth. She could feel her jaw clenching and her shoulders knotting up. Drawing ideas and starting to illustrate her own blog posts sounded quite do-able but after several attempts and much erasing, her picture still doesn’t look good enough.
What she’s imagining seems too complicated to draw, the character looks ick-y and things are just not working out the way she had hoped.
Apparently she’s going to have to opt for a stock photo this week.
Again.
But wait! Could this be a ray of hope?
It’s a trio of drawing ideas that can help Judith (or anyone) eliminate complications to draw their own stuff by keeping everything simple…
Let’s get right into it, shall we?
Are you daunted by needing to draw scenes so that they look ’real’?
There’s a simple solution — embrace absolute simplicity in your drawing ideas. This ‘folk art tradition approach’ really came back to me when I was poring over the cute Thai Cave rescue cartoons. One of the images that went viral on billboards around the country was this one, and it didn’t even use ‘real’ perspective.
Gasp! Imagine that?
As you can see, the artists from SISIDEA created a ‘cave’ space on the page then simply placed all the people, animals and objects they needed to tell the story somewhere appropriate within that overall frame.
This is a neat idea because you can avoid being daunted by ‘realness’ and simply arrange your simple depictions on the page. And it’s a technique that has been in use ever since we first created art in berry juice on the walls of our caves, so why abandon it now?
If you need extra validation, comfort yourself that this approach even has a fancy name — Naive Art — because drawing ideas and creating art without any formal training is a time-honoured tradition.
Is drawing human characters too complicated?
Drawing people, even cartoony ones, can be incredibly daunting and somehow it rouses our inner critics in ways we’d rather avoid. But what can you do instead?
Draw animals, of course! Drawing cartoon animals somehow bypasses our “I’m no artist” insecurities more easily than drawing cartoon humans. An added bonus is that cartoon animals can be both cute and humorous and readers often relate even better to animal illustrations than to human ones.
But don’t take my word for it! Here’s a timely reminder from Henneke Duistermaat in “4 Creative Ideas to Jazz up Simple Drawings”
Great, reliable advice from someone who has been doing this simply but successfully for years: “Replace Humans With Animals”.
No clever-clogs drawing ideas about what exactly to put on the page?
How about falling back on a recipe approach? Whether you love to eat or just eat to live, I’m sure you’ve been exposed to a recipe at some point. And what is a recipe if not a perfect template for creating a simple how-to piece?
It’s a reasonably simple step to go from thinking and writing to drawing ideas as a process (and the pictures can save you some words, too).
Here’s a superb yet simple example from Koosje Koene on They Draw and Cook, a site full of (delicious) recipes and recipe books in illustrated form. As you can see, illustrating a process in this way is ideal if you’re just starting out because you may well be able to repeat quite similar (and simple) images over and over (saving you both time and frustration).
You can round it off by adding notes in your own hand-writing.
(Hint: map your process out roughly on a piece of scrap paper before you get started, but be careful not to fall into the trap of planning obsessively. Done is always better than perfect ?)
Stop putting off doing your own blog illustrations
You may feel it’s impossible.
You may even be intimidated by people who illustrate their blogs with clever gags, eye-catching infographics or compelling cartoony stories.
But remember, each of them had to post their “first”. First sketchnote, first cartoon illustration, first picture strip.
You may doubt you can pull it off.
But remind yourself that even great artists have their doubts. Vincent Van Gogh thought he couldn’t draw. Leonardo da Vinci was prey to self-esteem issues. Cezanne was an outcast who couldn’t sell a single painting.
No-one starts off perfect. No-one is immune to self-doubt. And no-one ever feels ready.
Which means that this is the perfect moment to get started.
Commit yourself and just do it.
Because you can.
P.S. Here are two more blog posts you’ll find useful: