#illustratorblog

This month I want to talk about something I get asked about quite often (I don’t know why honestly): finding your style. This is a real pain for some, and it was also for me! Going back to the intro to this post, I have to admit that Past Sara was someone completely different from Today’s Sara. I consumed art in the form of anime and manga and my style was (obviously) leaning more towards that style. Without shame, I can admit that if it wasn’t for FullMetal Alchemist I’d probably be elsewhere now.

We hear about finding your style a lot. How many videos and podcasts have you already consumed, trying to capture who knows what secret recipe to suddenly unlock that style everyone was talking about?

On my part, I can say: a lot. A ton. And they all said the same thing: you have to draw. Draw for a lot of time and draw a lot of different stuff. But drawing is hard, isn’t it? Sitting in front of a blank page, pencil in your hand, ready but for what?

A very important lesson I’ve learned in art school is that you just have to draw. Small doodles, nothing fancy, nothing beautiful. Draw a cat, a car, a carrot. My mom once bought some veggies and I just drew them, then I got sick and changed the subject. It doesn’t matter what, just draw.

Learning that I don’t have to be always perfect, made my art more fluent. Now there are so many things I want to try drawing that I just can’t pick sometimes. Of course I have some fav subjects, but some days I just go “Frick it, I wanna learn how to draw dogs with very long snouts.” (they’re super fun btw). I knew I liked things drawn in a very specific style, something childish and loose, colorful and suitable for children’s illustration. Bold textures and simple shapes always fascinated me, so I incorporated them as well. I knew where I wanted to go, and I was determined and also having fun, so I kept going! I drew such bad stuff sometimes but it was ok. Turn the page and start over.

And with that, unexpectedly, it came. I saw something I recognized myself in, something fun and that I enjoyed!

My friend always says that when we constantly look for things, we don’t find them. And I wasn’t trying to find my style or something, I was just sketching for fun. That daily sketch session to warm up, ya know?

I’m obviously still evolving, and I don’t think that I suddenly came up with something people will recognize me for (or they do? Who knows. That would be nice), but I learned a lot from this experience. Looking at my sketchbooks now, I can recognize myself a bit more, page after page.

This doesn’t mean to be some kind of lesson. “Learn how to find your style in 3 easy steps!!”. Nah. I’m not a teacher and I’m still waaay too inexperienced to teach something, but I think I’m on the right path to build something solid. Maybe you can get some inspiration from this :-)

Anyways! Book rec time!

This month’s book is something I’ve got for studying purposes: a silent book. That’s right, the only word this book has is the title itself! And that title is “Island” by Mark Janssen.

I got this wonderful book because I’m trying to come up with a silent book myself! And I needed to study a bit more: since words are such an important part of illustrated books, the complete lack of them makes storytelling very hard.

How do you tell a story without words? With colors.

And Janssen does that wonderfully.

I thought I was going to flip through that book for five seconds, because it’s mute and I don’t need to read anything: but I was wrong! I found myself observing each page for minutes, narrating a story in my head with every single detail I could see. And I think that’s a wonderful thing! It lets you write a story of your own, just with a few, wonderfully composed illustrations that pop with colors and textures.

Can you tell I fell in love with this book?

And with that, we’re done for April! Next month I’ll be very busy studying and preparing my finals, so I think I’ll tell you something about them. I’m currently finishing up a couple of book projects for school I’m very proud of and I can’t wait to show you :-)

I hope you have a wonderful day, a wonderful month and that you enjoyed this month’s newsletter illustration. If you want to get it, you have to subscribe to my newsletter to get notified whenever a blog entry gets posted :-)

Thank you so much for reading! Bye!!