HOW IT HAPPENED
I am not a great artist; I am not a natural artist. By that I mean I can't seem to get the ideas I see in my head out into the world as I want them to be.
I watch people who sketch and always I think to myself, "How do they do that?" I mean, I can see how they're doing it but how does it work?
To practice my sketching I often follow Kyle Webster's Draw-A-Long shows, so I pulled out Girl With An Umbrella. A very rough sketch converted to vector and then adding colour, trying to dress up the sketch that I stumble onto something that sparked my creativity.
Using one of the custom Illustrator brushes I repeatedly drew circles. Not very exciting, I grant you, but the brush strokes layered in an interesting way. Circleism is born.
CREATING THE CUSTOM BRUSHES
Now, there's a couple of problems with Circleism in this first form. Drawing each brush stroke by hand creates a lot of anchor points, and my right thumb joint let me know it was not happy with all this work!
It is time to give this some thought. And I bought myself some time by getting ill and having a week in hospital.
The solution is Custom Illustrator Brushes, of course! I'm still new to creating my own Illustrator brushes and it takes me a few days of trial and error to create my first set.
A HALLOWE'EN WITCH
Again, a sketch from Kyle's Draw-A-Long provides the practice subject. It's October, an appropriate time for a witch to fly on her broom, accompanied by her faithful cat. As usual, it starts with my rough sketch which then becomes simple shapes and lines in Illustrator.
I haven't got a snazzy timelapse video of creating my witch; I ought to think about doing that one day.
