Making It Ep. 5: Sketching + Art Block

Hello, my darling patrons and friends, and welcome to the fifth episode of the Making It monthly series, where I take you step-by-step through how I make important pieces of my freelance art business. 

Throughout the series I’ll be sharing how I make my handmade earrings, enamel pins, custom portraits, process videos, stickers, product photography, and more, so you can be empowered to try making a new product or adding new techniques to your own process. 

For this fifth episode, I’ll be sharing my process for Sketching and slaying Art Block!

The sketching process is hugely important to me. I have never been the kind of artist who has a fully-formed picture in their head that they just need to put down on the page. I start with a feeling, emotion, or general subject, and use the sketching process to develop the image like molding clay.

Developing your sketching process is a lifelong endeavor, and will be intensely personal to you and your unique creative mind. These are some of the things I’ve noticed are important to my sketching process, and I highly recommend cultivating mindfulness about your own processes. Pay attention to what works and what doesn’t for you, without judgment. Keep an open mind, and see if any of my suggestions can be added to your process tool belt!

Also: This article is more about the sketching development process before a finished piece rather than the keeping of a sketchbook since I don’t currently keep a sketchbook in the traditional sense.

Let’s get to sketching!

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B  E  F  O  R  E     Y  O  U     S  T  A  R  T

 +  Live your life! I’ve said this so many times, but doing things that make you happy outside of art will enrich your subject matter beyond belief. Put away Instagram and make time for hiking, fashion, movies, video games, travel, spirituality, good food… Not only will this make you less likely to burn out, but your art will stem from your life rather than other peoples’ art. I keep a journal and literally make lists of things that I love deeply, and check back on it when I’m feeling stuck.

 +  Know what’s come before! If you’re an artist, pay attention to a wide range of other artists, contemporary and historic. The key to being original isn’t ignoring art, it’s recognizing your influences and using them strategically. Pay attention to the art that you like and seek to understand exactly what you like about it. Check out my style Arty Business article for more on this. 

If I have a very specific idea for a piece of art, sometimes I’ll do a little looking around and see if a million people have had that same idea before. Usually, that means I’ve seen someone else do it and just forgot. Or you can see what people have done and find ways to make it your own. What's important is that you're conscious of your influences.

 +  Plant a seed! This is some weird psychological magic. So, say I have a big, open-ended project and I have no idea what to do. I can rarely sit down in front of the paper and say, “Make the art, now!!” Before I get started on the project, I have to “plant a seed” in my own brain and let it grow on its own for a day or week, without pressure or commitment. I allow myself ruminating over the project during “subconscious” times: before I get out of bed in the morning, while taking a solo walk, cleaning, or taking a shower. And that’s when I get those "lightbulb moments". I have to give my mind space to gently grow the seed. It really weirdly, wonderfully works.

 +  Sketch on scrap! I’m not into fancy sketchbooks for my sketching phase of an illustration. I think it puts a lot of pressure on making the sketch perfect right away, and I like to get messy and loose in the beginning. I usually get a big pad of secondhand computer paper from a thrift store and use that for my development sketches.

S  K  E  T  C  H  I  N  G     T  E  C  H  N  I  Q  U  E  S

 +  Use your perfect tool! I have to use the right tool to sketch with or I’m distracted and frustrated, and I highly recommend you experiment and find a tool that lets you sketch loosely and freely. I prefer to use something a little bulkier to sketch with, like a Caran D’Ache Sketcher colored pencil or, on Procreate, the 6B Pencil or Evolve Brush. Other people like to sketch with a mechanical pencil and build up really light strokes, and others with a big thick crayon or marker.

If you’re feeling stuck, maybe try the opposite of what you normally use. Or something totally new!

 +  Work general to specific! Save yourself time and energy and work in big loose shapes before narrowing down to smaller ones.

 +  Work small! There's a reason so many projects start with a thumbnail stage! When you work small to start you're free to be much more general and quick, since your space is too small to get noodle-y with the details like when you work larger. 

 +  Set a timer! Great if you're finding yourself really bogged down in the details on a sketch that isn't working. Set a timer for each iteration of a sketch, anywhere from 30 seconds to two minutes, and then push yourself to do at least 5 iterations.

+ Don’t erase! Easier said than done, but try to draw without erasing to prevent yourself from being bogged down during the sketch phase. Drawing traditionally with a pen at first can be a good way to get some quick thoughts out, before moving to your digital program.

 +  Get perspective! Get a different view of your sketches by viewing them from further away: hold the paper far back from your face, zoom out until your sketch is tiny, or even take a picture of it with your cell phone. Flip your image horizontally on your program or hold your paper up to a mirror to see check your shapes and balance. This helps you see if the overall design reads well, and you'll likely notice things you couldn't at the normal scale.

 +  Brush up on drawing techniques! The above tips are more psychological than technical, but make it a point to regularly return to practicing your fundamental drawing techniques: like drawing from reference, life drawing, drawing with negative space, line variation, positive vs. negative shapes, etc. Break out the old drawing textbook your mom gave you in high school or order a fundamentals book and go through the exercises. I'll link a few my partner and I keep in our studio as a suggestion.

A  R  T     B  L  O  C  K

 + Have a ritual! Get ahead of art block by having a pre-work ritual to tell your brain it’s time to get down to business. On particularly strenuous work days I get ready by:

1. Cleaning my work space.
2. Getting a big glass of water and a cup of tea.
3. Setting out all my materials, raising my iPad up and cleaning it’s screen.
4. Putting on a “focus” instrumental playlist.
5. Lighting a candle and turning on my desk lamps.

+ Just start drawing! Sometimes what you need to do with art block is to just push through. Put your pencil to paper and get started. At a certain point you need to stop thinking and start making. The process of making anything at all can help you get un-stuck and into some good flow.

+ Take a break! No, not to check your email or social media. 

For a short break: watch a funny video, do some quick yoga, take a walk around the block, do a little dancing, eat a snack.

Longer breaks: Go to SLEEP, take weekends off, plan a vacation without drawing. 

And if this is a big-time art block burnout situation: take as long off as you can or need. Watch Kiki’s Delivery Service again with this theme in mind.

Practicing good work and break habits will prevent art block and burnout in the long run.

P  R  O  C  E  S  S    E  X  A  M  P  L  E

I wanted to share with you all my process for working through a particularly tough (for-me) design problem, a time that I had to do a lot of sketching to get to a design I was happy with. I view all or most illustrations as problems to be solved, and I typically can follow this process to solve the problem.

This process took me around 6 hours over the course of two days, with plenty of discussion and breaks and frustration. The convention name has been blocked because the merch hasn’t been announced yet.

+  Start with what you know! For this project, I knew from the client that I needed the title of the convention to be highlighted and that they wanted nerdy animals as the subjects. 

Since these were going to be on shirts, I wanted to make something more simple and graphic rather than illustrative, but still interesting and appealing to a convention-goer.

+ Sketch and assess! After doing a couple of warm-up character sketches I did a few designs that missed the mark in my opinion. Some seemed too simple and I thought the attendees wouldn’t like that. In reaction, I pivoted and started making designs that were too illustrative, and no longer had that graphic funky look I wanted. They were starting to look more like a scene from a book than a t-shirt I would personally want to buy. 

I looked over my sketches and noted what I liked (and discussed with my partner) before I moved on to more sketches with those elements in mind.

+ Sketch again! I illustrated a quick shirt to help me visualize the sketches on a final product. Through my first sketching process, I determined I liked the designs that represented the feeling of community and joy found at Comic Conventions and tried to focus on that in the new sketches. 

After a few sketch rounds, I drew this single funky little con-goer cat, and I thought she was SO CUTE. But her being alone eliminated the communal aspect I wanted. So I noted what I liked and moved on to...

1. Final sketch! I combined the aspects that I liked to create the final successful thumbnail of two happy con-goer animals and used that as a base to develop the rough to send to the client.

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R E S O U R C E S

• Skillshare Sketching Classes - Maybe invest in a class or two to brush up your sketching!
• How to Get Back Into Drawing - Video by Frannerd
• Into to Thumbnailing - Article from Concept Art Empire
• Why Artist's Block is Probably Just Something You've Made Up In Your Head - Article from Elite Daily in case you need a little kick in the butt.
• Beginner's Guide to Drawing - Great guide to some simple drawing exercises by Ralph Ammer
• Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist - James Gurney is the illustrator of Dinotopia, which I was obsessed with in 4th grade (and now), and is an excellent art educator. You don't have to be a realist to reap the benefits of his knowledge and techniques.
• Art Fundamentals: Theory and Practice - Sure, it's a textbook, but textbooks are awesome! You can look up the fundamentals online if you want or you can be extra and be your own professor with a textbook like this bad boy.
• Art Sticker Process Video - A video of my sketching process to create a sticker last year! Great if you’d like to see my actual sketching process in action for a casual project.
• Bridesmaids‘ Portrait Process Video - A video of my sketching and thumbnail process for a higher paying client portrait. I don’t normally offer thumbnail options for clients, but this one was pretty high stakes!

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I hope you found my thoughts on the sketching process helpful, and are feeling excited to  flex your sketching and sketch development muscles. My feelings and thoughts on sketching are kind of nebulous and psychological, so I hope I was able to break it down in a way that made sense and was helpful to you! 

So what do you think? Is there anything I need to clarify more? Do you have any questions or requests to add to the article? Is there another aspect of sketching that you'd like me to talk more in-depth about? Let me know in the comments!

And now I'd like to hear about how you sketch! What are your sketching and art block tips? Do you have a ritual to help you get into drawing-mode? Do you do cleaner or messier sketches than me, or just jump right into your art? Have you recently had a tough design nut to crack that put you through the sketching wringer? Let us know in the comments, and if you like, share some of your rough n' tumble or beautiful and perfect sketch pages in the Community tab here on Patreon! I LOVE to see people's messy and groundbreaking sketches, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that!

And of course, drop your requests for next month's Making It Episodes in the comments. And any other Patreon post requests, I'm open to breaking the pattern every once in a while, especially for something fun! 

'Til next time, have fun sketching!

xoxo, Ragon