Choose a word from the list and draw everything that comes to mind. Don’t be concerned about the accuracy of your drawing or the prettiness of it. Use your drawings as a form of visual shorthand.
OCA Illustration
Childhood Exotic Destruction Kitchen Wild Fashion Travel
Have a broad range of materials to hand and during your visual brainstorm add swatches of colour and texture associated with your word. If the word sums up a scene try to deconstruct it into its constituent parts. Imagine you are moving around the scene with a camera and recording each element to create a visual checklist a catalogue of images.
Be conscious of the details and qualities of each subject or object you draw to communicate its qualities and function. Notice how you are developing a sense of visual editing and distillation of information. Adjectives are most difficult to draw. Be aware of the mental processes you undertake to generate subjects to draw in response to these less concrete words.
Developing the ability to give tangible form of abstract concepts is important for illustration and is a skill that can be honed over time.
Note how your drawing evolves when repeating this exercise. Can you see a flavour in the way that you are begin to document through these little drawings?
Kitchen
For this exercise, I choose the word kitchen. Here me and my family spending every day cooking different culinary receipts. In my head I could easily imagine the process of cooking, and the location of each component of the kitchen, and what tools are being used. I thought would be good to create a circle of cooking process, and the position of some of the cooking tools in it. I see cooking as a creative process, which is never boring or tiring for me, as by adding some creativity to it number of different masterpieces can be done. Also, I’m supporting healthy eating with a good combination of meat and vegetables, and as a treat some home bakery for the special occasions. I created a quick map where each element would be located and would go around the circle by adding some extra parts and ingredients. I started with vegetables, then a cooking pan, and then added elements going clockwise. Here I was making imaginative vegetable stew, and at the same time baked a sweet pie, which first should go into the oven and then be served on the table with some nice cup of tea. In our kitchen, we have a culinary books shelf, filled with receipts from around the world, an important part of a good cook. I added them too, with some flower pots and kitchen towels. I think I mentioned pretty much all elements I use every day.
The first sketch I made with a pencil, and then was adding some colour details to it. Also, I added some arrows and descriptions next to them, to explain the concept of the illustrations. For the colours, I chose basic colours, such as red, green, blue and yellow, as they are essential colours that any illustration can be based on, and also those colours are easy to digest, and they considered to be components of healthy meals. The images turned out cartoony-like, and quite neat, I’m assuming the reason for that, is because the illustration is quite a new field to me, I’m choosing the safe path of developing the ideas. I will keep on practising more, that to implement some new styles into my sketches, like expressive illustrations, try new approaches and bring my illustration skills to a new level.
Updated illustration
For the final design I used some of my Photoshop skills. I placed the illustration in the new layer with Exclusion filter. by making it look in negative colours, and then corrected the colour combination back to the natural shades, which made my drawings look like they were made by pastel or chalk on the top of the black board, that widely used at the restaurants for the meal description. I think that filter made my drawing more appealing from the design point of view, so I would keep those experiments in mind and keep on implementing and developing new skills.
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