3 Illustration Exercises to Unleash Your Imagination

Boost your creativity with these exercises for drawing illustrated cartoons

The creative process for a professional cartoonist can be challenging. You need to practice observation skills, draw inspiration from the everyday, develop a unique sense of humor, and constantly hone your ability to condense your messages into tiny spaces.

With almost 2 million followers on social media, Óscar Alonso—better known as 72kilos (@72kilos)—has formed habits that help him develop new ideas for his readers as well as brands such as Adidas, Amnesty International, and the Red Cross.

If you're looking for new ways to generate ideas, below the Spanish illustrator shares three tried-and-tested exercises that he uses for his comics.

The secret to imagination: technique

The three exercises below are techniques 72kilos has developed over his years as a cartoonist. Although he explains that sometimes he loves to just sit down with his sketchbook and let the magic happen, often he finds it even more rewarding when he uses these techniques as everything flows more smoothly.

"Far from rules and regulations, these exercises are a game of their own," he explains. "You should think of them as a recreational activity," he suggests. In this game, you jot down all your new ideas in a notebook as you think of them and check back later when you have a new assignment or when creative block prevents you from starting on a project you're committed to.

Ideally, you want to carry out these exercises daily to help build up a stockpile of creative resources. Think of your notebook as a laboratory in which everything is good and anything goes—there will always be time to reassess the content in the future.

Exercise one: manipulating photos

We all have thousands of photos we've snapped in our digital reels that carry special meaning to us. What we're trying to achieve here is to give those same photos another look, to generate new meaning with words that are not in the image.

For this exercise, 72kilos usually uses photos of landscapes and familiar or everyday situations. With a bit of thought and time, he explains, you can incorporate messages or text and turn the settings into something else.

If you can't come up with anything, be spontaneous and put the first sentence that comes to mind to keep it fresh. What you come up with may be funny, or not, but leave it there and revisit it in a few weeks or months to see if it works or what changes to make. Sometimes, 72kilos adds two or three dialogues to the photo to have various options later on.

72kilos usually practices these exercises on his iPad by importing photos to Procreate. For this demonstration, however, he's carried out the exercise using printed images to make it more visual:

Exercise two: create a dialogue with pre-prepared phrases

The second exercise is similar to the first one, except the idea is to add to the photos with pre-written dialogue. In this case, the phrases are cut out and stored in a box. These should be lines from curious, interesting, or amusing conversations that you can then put together. The idea is to look for dialogue that links to some of your images—perhaps they express a mood or desire, or maybe they're just funny.

See some of his examples below:

- I got tired of tidying up
- What will I do when the gas runs out
- Napping time and you're not there
- I liked the beach in the summer
- I got burned
- I can't see straight since I was little
- Being close is always in fashion

You will see that in different contexts, the sentences acquire different meanings. For this, the prep-work done beforehand is key.

Exercise three: use famous quotes

For the third exercise, build up a notebook with famous quotes that you can easily find on the web. The idea is that these phrases will help trigger new concepts, words, and elements that can be used to generate vignettes.

Pick a phrase, copy a structure, or change a single word to give the quote a whole new meaning. These phrases are a great prompt when you don't have the resources or time to think up ideas from scratch.

Top tips for carrying out the exercises

- Remember to compile everything in your notebook(s) so that nothing is forgotten or lost on loose sheets of paper. This way you have an organized record of what you're doing. For example, whether it's a note about a landscape or a curious occurrence in the subway, keep it in the same book.

- Go for a notebook that's easy to carry around.

- Although you can use digital tools such as phones or iPads to store all your notes, the physicality of paper brings a magical element to the process: you can file work graphically and review it at a glance to see what works and doesn't in a chronological way.

- Remember to review the content in your notebooks from time to time; something you discarded for one client could be a source of inspiration for another. What doesn't work today may work later.

- When keeping your notebook, you should not think about whether it looks nice or not. You set the rules, and the fewer you set, the more fun it will be, the richer the notebook will turn out, and the more ideas it will give you.

These are some of the techniques that 72 kilos uses in his work. If you want to see more, such as how he creates a map of ideas, sign up for his course, Illustrated Ideas: Draw Your Inner Universe.

English version by @acesarato.

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