Exercise 1

Short Circuit

This exercise aims to short-circuit your existing creative process by suggesting a range of new non-linear prompts to respond to and learn from. Apply them to your existing project work. 

Each of the following prompts might represent 5–10 minutes of creative activity. Select three to get you going, before returning to add more phases in your process. Aim to fail and learn through the process rather than trying to create something you know you can achieve. 

Document and reflect on the process, have you been surprised by the outcomes? 

  • Define it 

So I spent sometime working on some illustrations of full scenes to practise pulling everything together. I’m use to drawing individual elements (illustrations ) to then make up and layer in Illustrator for surface pattern design. So it’s been my focus over the last year to relly think about scenes for book illustration (full spreads etc) So I have started to draw and paint full scenes to practise before I attempt the actual illustrations for the children’s book.

So my illustration is of a sea scene with a moored up rowing boat, with the sea gone out, and some seagulls in the sky. There are reeds and grasses in the fore ground, and a wonky fence that draws your eye in wards. I used a reference photo (Browne, Oil painting), but did my own version in my own style, and added extra elements and took others away.

  • Make it bold 

I then used my iPad and the pro-create app to change the look of the illustration. To make it bold I made the saturation higher, and the highlights higher too, so just the boat, the reeds and the fence showed through.

  • Let’s look at the real thing 

Here is the original painting illustration I did on watercolour paper.

  • Introduce time, motion and sound 
  • What is the key moment? 
  • Create a variation 

I created another variation on Pro-create which took away the yellow and green tones in the picture, I really like the way the white and blue pop on the dark background.

  • Connect play, fantasies and daydreams 
  • Combine seemingly arbitrary content 

I decided to use the pro-create app again and this time I took out all the colour and changed it to just black and white. I felt this gave the picture more of a drawing, sketching using just pencil look, it gives a completely different feel to the way I intended the original to be.

  • Erase the distinctions between original and copy 
  • Consider again your motivation 
  • Make it obvious 
  • Make it ambiguous 

I then decided to try a similar thing on my phone with the original illustration, but this time I added an all manner of things and didn’t care how it turned out. I changed the brightness so it was really low, I changed the saturation really high, I got rid of all the shadows, I sharpened it etc.

  • Remind yourself 

I have reminded myself what the original looked like and why I wanted to paint it that way, but I do really like the the second variation, this could be great as a night scene, it also creates a fantasy feeling to the picture. This process has defiantly given me some more ideas of different ways to create atmosphere and have other time of day illustrations, that would make a book come to life more.

  • Bounce around at speed
  • ‘We’ve got a problem, Houston’