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The Summer Promptathon is Coming
2025 • 06 • 24 - 2025 • 06 • 30
Click here for more info
Having trouble coming up with something to draw? No worries - while you'll eventually learn how to start from a tiny seed of a thought and gradually nurture it into a complex concept to explore through design and illustration, it's perfectly fine not to be there just yet.
For now though, here's an idea that might interest you.
Junkyard Symphony
When I was a kid, this group named "Junkyard Symphony" would come to our school and perform for us - they'd grab a bunch of random garbage and out of it, would create the most complex, intriguing musical pieces (at least to my eight year old brain). Today, we'll do the same - though fortunately, ours don't have to work, and nor do they have to be played in front of an audience.
Design an instrument using the kinds of objects you'd find in a junkyard. Everyday things, forgotten things, one man's trash is another man's treasure. You may want to start with an existing instrument and figure out how to swap out its tailor-made components for whatever scrap you can find, or create something entirely new.
This one isn't doing it for you? How about this one instead: The Court of the Rat King >>>
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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.