Ever finish an illustration only to realize that it’s a total fail? 🤦♀️🤦♂️ It happens! Especially when you are still in the beginning stages of learning illustration.
Well, here’s the method Lee White uses to avoid this exact scenario! (If his name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s one of the founders of SVSLearn 😉) You can hear all about his strategy in the 15 minute video above ⬆️⬆️⬆️
Lee says the root of the problem is a lack of planning - too often students go from idea to finished painting, without doing all the necessary groundwork to create a successful image.
In the video, he goes over 6 basic steps that will ensure that you 💖love💖 the final result. Each step must be completed before going on to the next step!
Research and development. This is where you find work that inspires you and analyze why. There is no drawing at this stage!
Do 50 thumbnail sketches. Yes, 50! This will help you really explore all the possibilities and figure out composition, without creating finished work.
Pick your top 3 thumbnails and do rough sketches with value. But don’t go making final art! Just make it good enough so that you can show it to other people and get feedback.
Pick your top sketch and do 3-4 color studies, more if you need to! Again, this is not final art. This is more to play with different color combinations.
Do a full-size, clean sketch, in whatever format you are working in. This is clean up all the rough edges.
Now you are ready to do the final painting! At this point, you have already done all the groundwork, so this part should be fun!
This process allows you to solve any problems before going on to the next stage, so by the time you get to the final version, you can be sure that you will love it!
“How great would it be to go through and really like what you’re doing each time you do it? This is a way to do that. If you’ve done all these things, there’s no possible way you can get to this point and not like it, because your values are set, your composition is set, you picked the right concept, you picked the right layout, all of it has been done. You did the work and you did it in each stage…You’re breaking things down. You’re not trying to solve composition, color, perspective, all that stuff in one step. You’re trying to do it over time.”
Lee created the video for his newly rebooted YouTube channel, where he will be posting content about the tips and tricks he uses as a professional artist.
Subscribe to his channel to get all his latest videos! Any requests for future topics he should cover?