Illustration 1: Key steps in illustration- Part 2: Ideas -Exercise 3: Turning words into pictures
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.
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.
Childhood
Wild
Exotic
Fashion
Destruction
Travel
Kitchen
I chose the word ‘fashion’ and began by creating a spider diagram of words that came to mind and expanded upon them. I moved onto sketching visuals from these words, some literal and some more abstract, I then added colour to the pen sketches.
I then sketched the scene that came to mind initially when considering fashion and how it related to my work.
I feel like I should integrate more sketches including colour/texture when working on a design. I usually use a pencil/pen and sketch very rough thumbnails before working but never focus on texture/colour until I begin to work on the design. As I like to use images/mark making within my design work/illustrations this process would definitely be beneficial to me to test and experiment with ideas/colours.
