Illustration Tutorial: exercises to stimulate creativity

Learn these techniques to unlock creativity and free your hand to draw, with Weberson Santiago

Creativity is a simple process that, although it sometimes requires a lot of effort to come up with good creative solutions, it can be practiced. In illustration, for example, in addition to practice, a wide repertoire of references and influences is necessary.

This is how an illustrator defines his or her authorial style through lines, colors and sensations capable of attracting all eyes.

Weberson Santiago (@webersonsantiago), illustrator, writer and teacher, is an expert when it comes to creativity. He has several books and projects published and has worked for Veja magazine and Folha de S. Paulo newspaper. Besides writing children's books and working for the press, she illustrates books and magazines for several Brazilian and Portuguese publishers.

In this tutorial, he teaches techniques to unleash your creativity and let your hand free when illustrating. Don't miss it!

Have you ever looked at the paper and thought... "what am I drawing now"? Creative block affects illustrators, musicians and painters as much as writers, photographers or anyone else doing creative work.

This seemingly endless and often despairing moment is easily resolved by creating and following a few creative exercises that help create new possibilities and free up the creative process.

Create ink blots

On a sheet of paper - or on the base of your choice - make a random inkblot. Ideally, you should make the blot while looking away, thus ensuring that it won't have any interference from your usual stroke.

When you make one or more spots, the challenge is to try to find some figure in the silhouettes that have formed with the ink. Let your imagination run wild, because you may see an animal, a face, a person dancing... the idea of this exercise is to give you a starting point to create, playing with the beauty of randomness.

Every time you do this exercise you will discover a completely different figure from what you usually do when you want to control the design.

Create stamps

Using stamps with simple geometric shapes is a way to create playful, fun and unexpected characters or figures. You can create stamps with EVA using materials you find at home: soda caps, containers and even olive oil.

Experiment with these shapes freely, both to create new stamp shapes and to discover new effects caused by the ink.

Use other techniques to go further in your drawing and give it an author's touch. Pens, stickers, collage... anything goes!

In these exercises you will start without knowing what you are going to create, starting from a simple idea to experiment and create something completely new and different from what you are used to.

Use masking tape

This material is absolutely versatile and here you can use it to outline spaces and shapes on the paper, as well as to define where you are going to paint, illustrate or stamp.

Create a simple design and then reserve an area with the tape. This technique helps not only to prevent paint from seeping through, but also to create straight lines and other geometric shapes.

You can also create some patterns and effects using the ribbon, as in the following example.

These are three simple exercises that will help you at the moment of the creative block, but can also be used as creative techniques at any time of the process. Let your imagination run wild and, above all, experiment.

Did you like this tutorial? If you want to learn with Weberson how to develop your own drawing style from observation and transform a blank page into a garden of ideas, don't miss his online course Graphic Illustration Lab.

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