This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.

8:04 AM, Wednesday January 20th 2021
Seems okay, just keep practising the Assignment as Warm Up and you'll improve gradually! Now on to the 250 Box Challenge!
Next Steps:
250 Box Challenge
8:46 PM, Friday October 27th 2023
Marking as complete, but continue to improve that line work - Experiment with the following things, one at a time, to see if you can improve any of them to make your lines less wobbly:
-
Speed - If you are swooping the line too quickly, the ends may curve. Too slowly, and they will wobble.
-
Shoulder and elbow position - See if you are holding them loosely and confidently.
-
Hand and wrist firmness - Pretend your hand is immobile, like the end of a perfect line-drawing machine. It has no role except to move where the elbow and shoulder tell it.
-
Focus - Experiment with focusing at the end dot, the entire line, or a combination.
-
Ghosting - Only ghost in the direction you want to draw the line, and at the exact speed and direction you want to draw it.
Keep drawing, and best of luck!
-Ignite

Framed Ink
I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.
Unlike the spatial reasoning we delve into here, where it's all about understanding the relationships between things in three dimensions, composition is all about understanding what you're drawing as it exists in two dimensions. It's about the silhouettes that are used to represent objects, without concern for what those objects are. It's all just shapes, how those shapes balance against one another, and how their arrangement encourages the viewer's eye to follow a specific path. When it comes to illustration, composition is extremely important, and coming to understand it fundamentally changed how I approached my own work.
Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.
Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.