Conceptual illustration

I've recently got interested in the idea of conceptual illustration. I follow Bardot Brush on Instagram, and she had come up with some conceptual illustration prompts as part of the Making Art Every Day challenge. She has a really good tutorial that explains what conceptual illustration is, and how to do it!

Conceptual illustration is about conveying ideas, e.g. by combining two unrelated concepts rather than just drawing things as they are, and it's used a lot in editorial illustration. Without knowing it, I'd already been doing conceptual illustration for the AInktober challenge last year, which I loved!

I decided to try some of the Making Art Every Day conceptual illustration prompts, and, rather than just going straight ahead to the drawings, I took advice from the tutorial and brainstormed various ideas in a sketchbook first. The drawings here are lemon + eye, pasta + hair, and bread + bed.

I'm planning to draw more of the prompts, and have come up with some ideas of my own too. It's definitely a type of illustration that really appeals to me!

Fun a Day Dundee: Vietnam illustrations

This year I took part in Fun a Day Dundee, which takes place in January. It's all about doing something fun (usually creative) during the endlessly dark and tedious first month of the year.

Because I'd been to Vietnam at the end of November and it was still fresh in my mind, I decided to base my project on that. I thought of all the things I'd seen in Vietnam that felt iconic of that country.

I wanted to create a somewhat retro style of illustration that looked like it had been printed, so I learned a lot of new skills in Procreate, like using halftone images and slightly mis-matching the alignment of the layers. Towards the end of the month I also treated myself to some mid-century brushes from Bardot Brush, so that I could create an ink-bleed look and some other retro effects.

I really enjoyed being part of Fun a Day Dundee and posting my illustrations on Instagram every day. I'm hoping that there's going to be an exhibition of everyone's work soon!

Inktober: AInktober

Not content with doing one set of Inktober illustrations, I decided to also participate in AInktober, for which Janelle Shane used artificial intelligence to come up with lists of prompts for the month.

This was an amazing challenge! The prompts were so out-there that I really had to think hard about what to draw for each of them. I really feel that after this I could draw anything!

The best thing was seeing what other people had come up with for the same prompts each day. My favourites to draw were It really ate him, ornery beach sheep, and scarfed mystery.

I was also lucky enough to win a copy of Janelle's book for one of my drawings, 2 blocks squishy, and I look forward to reading that when it arrives!

Inktober: Rentober

I haven’t ever taken part in Inktober before, but this year, Renmeleon, who I’ve followed since my Flickr days, came up with a list of prompts for #rentober that really inspired me, and I was able to use them to come up with a series of drawings that are sort of a combination of my Amelie and Hidden Faces projects.

I suppose I am “cheating” a bit by doing digital drawings for Inktober, which is supposed to be about “real” drawings. But I don’t care! I think all art is equally valid, and this is the medium that I’m really enjoying using at the moment.

I enjoyed coming up with a colour scheme that felt autumnal and spooky. Many of the drawings would have fitted in really well with my Hidden Faces project – it’s funny how I felt short of ideas for that project sometimes!

I think my favourite drawing is the tree, I think it has a cute look to it! I may try to develop this idea further.

Amélie digital illustrations

After seeing Amélie the Musical, and rewatching the film (with only the French subtitles!), I was really in the mood to create some Amélie inspired art. I'd also just finished my 100 day project, in which I'd used a template to create various characters, including Amélie, so I decided to start a new project drawing Amélie's outfits.

I adjusted my template a bit, to make it more elegant, added the face, and perfected the hairstyle. I then drew together some colour palette ideas, then began to draw the outfits.

I'm really pleased with how these illustrations have turned out, and I went on to do an Inktober drawing project inspired by them, which I'll tell you more about soon.

Drawing all the outfits is going to be an ongoing project, as there are quite a few fron the film that I haven't done yet, and I'd like to draw those from the various versions of the musical and some of my own devising too!

100 Days Project Scotland Show

Earlier this year I took part in the 100 Days Project Scotland, and I created my Hidden Faces project. At the end of last month the artists involved got together to exhibit our work at The Fire Station at Edinburgh College of Art. 

The Fire Station is an amazing space, but as a listed building it has certain challenges (no nails or other fixings in the tiled walls, no red wine on the tiled floor), so we had to be creative in how we displayed our work. 

On the Sunday before the show opened some of us got together to construct some of the displays. On Wednesday, when the show was opening, I took the day off work and headed across to hang my work. It was harder work than I expected, with lots of stretching and bending, but eventually, after an hour, my art was on the wall! 

The opening night was a huge success, with the room buzzing with people. I loved seeing people looking with interest at my art. My absolute favourite was the young girl seen here in the photo with her mum, who immediately spotted and identified Lucy Worsley’s suffragette sash, and Marie Curie, both in the second row of my display. I was so impressed with her knowledge and her ability to notice details (especially when they were so far above her eye level!)

It was so amazing to meet the artists whose work I’d been following for so long, including Fenella, Fiona, Val, Jill, Penny, Ruth, Ellie, and many more. It was lovely to meet the “Messy” family,, whose display of pompoms was just opposite me, especially my almost-namesake Emily!

The show closed on Sunday, and we then took our work down and dismantled things. Huge thanks to Isla who has organised everything so well! It's a fantastic project to take part in, and I'd encourage you to try it next year!