Drawing Your Monthly Favourites: An Illustration Exercise

Learn how to draw your own monthly favourites illustration and document your various memories and activities. The design is easy to customise, you can include anything you like, events, trips you’ve taken, clothes, food, a new purchase, tv shows or movies you've watched.  . . the idea is to bring together a group of elements that really celebrates that month and the things you enjoyed. They can be milestones like a wedding or a graduation or they can be very simple like a new scarf you bought or a recipe you tried for the first time. Sometimes it’s so easy to forget all the little things that we enjoyed in the moment and this is a visual way of recording these small parts of our lives. I’ve been creating my own monthly favourites as a personal project this year and it’s great to be able to look back on them afterwards.

In this class I’m going to be taking you through my process for creating the illustration. Starting with brainstorming ideas, coming up with the objects to draw and how I approach representing more complex themes. I’ll also talk about layout and the design of the illustration and then we’ll move on to sketching, inking and giving the illustration a wash of color with watercolors.  I’ll share my decision making process and give you some, hopefully helpful, tips and tricks along the way. This class is suitable for complete beginners, as well as those of you how may have some experience but are looking for some new ideas.

What You Will Learn

I’ll be walking you through every step of the process and sharing: 

• Tips for brainstorming ideas and coming up with a group of ten objects for your design
• Tips for doodling simple objects and how I turn events or experiences into objects to draw
• Tips for laying out the design and how to create a balanced illustration
• Tips for creating movement and flow in the design
• Adding text to the illustration 
• Adding simple line variation when inking
• Adding color to the illustration with watercolors

Materials You Will Need

Here's a general list of supplies I’ll be using in this class however please feel free to use whatever materials you have at home. I like to work traditionally but you could also use your digital tablet and a drawing app if you preferred. 

• Pilot Graphite Mechanical Sketching Pencil – 0.5 lead
• Sketchbook (for thumbnails and rough sketches)
• Watercolour Paper – 300gm
• Derwent Graphik Line Marker – Sepia 0.3
• Winsor and Newton Watercolours
• Pentel Waterbrush (normal paintbrushes and water would work fine as well)
• Posca White Paint Pen

I hope you’ll join me for this class and create your own monthly favourites illustration. If you have any questions or comments then feel free to reach out and let me know, I’m here to help and make sure you share your project photos with the rest of the class and now let’s get started.