Teigan Mudle's Illustrations

Weekly Illustration #NavIllustrations

Issues 1 to 3: I’ve talked about sharing the Illustrations I do for The Nav on this blog before, but I haven’t really done it till now because the release dates for the issues happen two weeks after I create the illustrations. It just never really lined up with my blog, and I was always creating additional illustrations to share with you weekly instead. But now that this semester is almost over, I thought I should share with you some of the highlights from the last three issues. 

All of these illustrations were done by me, but I’m not claiming to have done all of the page layouts since it’s always a collaborative effort between the graphic designers that work at The Nav. 

Working for The Nav has been great for my illustration skills, and it’s really increased my drawing speed. The art direction for this magazine is fairly consistent, and I feel like I’ve managed to sculpt it into a way that fits my individual style but is also replaceable by other members of the team when they need to fill in for me (I tend to illustrate about 80% of everything that goes into The Nav). This style is really loose and fun to create, and I enjoy having it in my tool belt for the future. I also think it’s heavily influenced my other, more detailed style that I tend to use in my own time. 

It may not look like it when you look at this blog, but my style has changed vastly from a year ago. Before then, I tended to draw really realistic and pristine illustrations, which I think stemmed from the common perception that good art is something that looks photo-realistic. I’m really glad that my opinion has changed. I still love drawing highly detailed things—but I value character a whole lot more now. It kind of feels like my drawing style has settled a little bit into something that I can produce in a manageable manner, but I still think I have so much of it to discover and play with. I’m excited to do that! 

So yeah, The Nav has changed me, for the better.

Weekly Illustration #13

Coloured Dnd Sticker: This week I finished up my sticker design, and instead of making just one version, I‘ve created a colour series. I’m actually planning on printing these and trying to sell them, so although having multiple versions will drive the production prices up, it’ll give customers the ability to choose their favourite colour combinations. 

Weekly Illustration #12

DnD Sticker: This week I did something completely different from what I normally do, and decided to work in illustrator. One of the things I’ve been meaning to do this semester is to create a custom Dungeons & Dragons DM screen for my boyfriend. My plan for it is to make a really ornate pattern using common weapons and items that you normally find in the game. Unfortunately, doing this would also mean that it would be very complicated and time-consuming to create. 

Weekly Illustration #11

I wasn’t sure if I had to do two weekly illustrations over reading break since it’s technically two weeks till our next class, but I’ve was feeling better lately so I’ve experimented as my eyes have allowed.

Mandala: since completing my sketchbook cover the other week, I’ve been itching to make some more detailed patterns. This time I decided to try out the radial symmetry function in Procreate for the first time. lately, I’ve been doodling a lot of alchemy/Nordic ruins on things so I went into this drawing with the idea to work with those sorts of designs. Since I kept the background dark (for my eye's sake) I decided to use the light pen brush to give it more of a ‘magickal’ vibe (the K is fully intended in that “magick”). I drew the entire mandala out in a bright green, then changed the colours after. Afterwards, I experimented with different layer modes and came up with the second version, which I equally like.

Weekly Illustration #10

Weekly Illustration #9

This week I was actually planning on working on human anatomy some more, but I got carried away with this instead. A happy accident. 

Workbook Volume II: I recently filled up my general sketchbook that I use for notetaking and thumbnails for all of my classes. So I’ve moved onto a new one, which has a brown cardstock cover like the last one. Typically, I’ll just write a title in the middle of the cover then slowly doodle everywhere over time till it’s filled up. Not so with this cover though. I ended up writing the title in like I normally do (the Japanese says, “Japanese notebook” since I write all of my Japanese notes in my sketchbooks) but then I started doodling some radial patterns. And then I just kept going! I think I spent about 4-6 hours on this? I found it really relaxing so I lost track of time while I was working on this. I’m really happy with the end result and I enjoy how the white and black ink interacts with the brown cardstock. I’m finding it more and more enjoyable to work off of coloured backgrounds. 

Weekly Illustration #7

Gesture Drawing: This week I didn’t create a finished illustration, but instead worked on brushing up on my people drawing skills.  I lightened up the work I normally put into my weekly illustration in order to take a much-needed break. 

When I was doing my Fine Arts certificate at my previous school I had a class called “Drawing for Story”. In it, I spent most of my time doing quick 1-2 minute sketches of live models. It was amazing and helped me feel so much more comfortable drawing people. One of the main things I picked up from that class was the concept of drawing “force” using simplified, fluid lines. You can’t really see it here, but all of my drawings include the lines of force and applied force which I then drew over in an attempt to draw out the human body. I need to get back into these sorts of studies in my own type again. 

Like colour, drawing people intimidates me. I tend to want to draw landscapes and houses and just actively avoid drawing people because they have always been a sore spot for me. This is obviously a bad idea. Instead, I’m going to put some more time into seriously learning how to draw the human body. First, I need to come up with a plan and a checklist for how to go about that though.

Before I started this class I researched and wrote notes about how to draw the human head, regardless of which angle you choose and I feel much more capable drawing portraits because of that. The human body just has so many different parts to it though that it would take a very long time to cover everything. I think I need to figure out which elements would help me the most. 

Weekly Illustration #6

This week I was tasked with finishing off the colouring book cover for our class. I had to “colour it in”. The first image is what I was given as an art direction, and I worked off of that.

 My first instinct was to colour it in using the same colour palette and just leave the area around the title and VIU logo white to illustrate that it was something you coloured in. I ended up placing some extra white spaces around the cover to help lead the eye and make it very apparent that this was something hand-coloured. My teacher/Art Director then gave me feedback saying that people don’t actually colour something in that way at all. I agreed with him and tried a different concept while making some other additional adjustments. 

Weekly Illustration #5

This week I worked at The Nav and I drew all of the illustrations inside of this issue, but I can’t really show you till it goes to print.

Weekly Illustration #4

This week we were assigned a prompt: draw your happy place. We had ten minutes in class to come up with a sketch, and then we had to finish it off on our own. I spent WAY too much time on this piece but I was really excited about it. 

Weekly Illustration #3

This was a busy week!

Spectres: Painting ominously vague blobs overtop of a photograph has been an idea I’ve been thinking about for a while and this week sounded like a good idea to try it out. The execution of this illustration was fairly easy and quick. It was fun to lightly mess around with lightly manipulating an image in Procreate. To me, it doesn’t feel quite like I was hoping it would though. I think I need to play around with this concept more in the future. 

Texture: This started off as a random scribble on a canvas to test out a new brush. I was about to delete it when I noticed how interesting it looked and decided to continue building on it. If you read the VIU school newspaper you’ll notice that a lot of textures are used to liven it up. This one will be used on the bio and horoscopes pages of The Nav and potentially elsewhere as well. 

Sea Scene from Imagination: Whenever I start off a new document I have a habit of starting off my drawing on a white background. I don’t like this since it helps perpetuate my fear of colour as well as hindering my ability to add a balanced spectrum of values. For this illustration, I finally forced myself to work with colour from the beginning of the drawing. I was mainly messing around with a new combination of brushes to lightly imitate a watercolour/wet acrylic look. At the same time I casually tried applying some principles of light that I learned about in Colour and Light and thinking about how it could change the colour tones. I didn’t do a very good job but I feel confident if I take some active notes on the subject and do some light studies I can improve my technique.

A Happy Accident: Typically when I work in Procreate I put a lot of little sketches or projects on one file if it’s really simple. If I start a project I’ll dedicate a proper file to it but in this case, I had the last two illustrations on one file. I was working with my Procreate file to extract the texture layer from it and create a PNG from it. During the process of that, she turned on both illustrations at once and it made this happy accident. I really love it! It’s a much more interesting piece than either illustration on its own and it encourages me to try laying textures into future illustrations.  

Weekly Illustration #2

This week I got a little bit carried away and created two illustrations. To make things easy, in the future whenever I have multiple illustrations I’ll combine them both into one weekly post.

Abandoned Cabin: This week I decided to draw in my new sketchbook to change things up from last week. I ended up surprising myself with the quality of this piece. Studying perspective has finally been paying off it seems. I used a reference photo that I found on Reddit (posted by /born2stab) because I thought this little abandoned cabin was adorable. I first sketched out the drawing in pencil, then went over it with Micron pens (sizes 003, 005. 01, and 02). I’m extremely pleased with how the trees turned out because I love trees—but they are so hard to draw. There's an illustrator on Instagram who goes by the tag @mattxschu who I fervently follow. He has a really interesting technique for drawing trees so I studied some of his illustrations and tried applying it. I’m pleased to say that it turned out well. I’m curious to see how this style can be applied to my digital style of drawing.

A Giant Key

We’re off to a good start! For my first illustration assignment, I had to come up with a list of 20 random words, choose two, then combine them into a single illustration. I found the brainstorming process (first image) really enjoyable, and after I had written out my list I proceeded to do a series of thumbnail sketches. I ended up settling on ‘giant key’ although it was a toss-up between that one and the top right thumbnail ‘giant stone’. The deciding factor was which one had an easier perspective, which is something I’ve been working on lately but I’m still not fully confident on. 

I illustrated this piece in Procreate, which has been an amazing program that has finally allowed me to make the jump to digital art. I normally struggle with my brush choices, but this time I just used my favourite brush the “shale” calligraphy brush for the entire painting and it worked out really well. I also liked working in black and white which has been my go-to process lately since colour is really intimidating. I normally start in black and white, focus on the values, then add a colour overlay layer on top and paint in the colour that way.