General Principles for a Good Illustration Portfolio
Learn what to include in your portfolio, on Instagram and other formats, to sell your work to art directors and publishers
Domestika's blog
The largest creative community
All articles
Categories
Popular tags
-
-
SEO Tutorial: What and How to Measure in Google Analytics and Search Console
Learn the key steps to measuring your SEO strategy and the free tools that you can use with technical and strategic SEO consultant Natzir Turrado No matter the size of the business, by using SEO tools you can create a greater chance of your website organically being ranked highly by search engines like Google, helping you to reach the exact clients that interest you the most and increasing the number of promotional possibilities. But what metrics and tools are essential to use when working on the positioning of a website? In the following video tutorial, SEO consultant Natzir Turrado (@n_turrado_ruiz) details how to use Google Analytics and Search Console to understand if your website is successfully reaching its goals. Find out more below.
-
Giacomo Prestinari: “It’s possible to tell a powerful story in under 30 seconds”
We talk to Giacomo Prestinari, editor of some of the most famous TV commercials today Many of the commercials he has worked on rank high on the list of those that have made us laugh and cry in front of the TV (or computer) screen. Many were edited in remote and unexpected places around the world–something which seems to awaken even more creativity in Giacomo Prestinari (@giacomo_prestinari). We spoke to him to learn about the work of a video editor for advertising in more depth and discovered some of the secrets behind his best commercials.
-
What’s a Storyboard and What's a Shooting Board
Storyboard artist Pablo Buratti talks us through the difference between these key pre-production tools If you are both an illustrator and a cinema aficionado, storyboarding might be your calling. A vital tool in the pre-production stage of any audiovisual project, a storyboard depicts a film sequence, breaking down situations and actions into individual panels to show how they will unfold. Pablo Buratti (@pabloburatti) is an illustrator working in the film industry. He is a storyboard artist working across character design, set design, concept design, and more. Pablo landed his first storyboarding job over fifteen years ago for Luis Sepúlveda’s film, Nowhere. It was after this that he became determined to make a career out of this way of fusing illustration and film. Since then, Pablo has worked on numerous projects, including Pedro Almodóvar’s four most recent feature films, from Broken Hugs (2009) up to Julieta (2016). He has also worked with directors Álex de la Iglesia on the film Witching & Bitching and JA Bayona on The Impossible. Pablo has collaborated with Daniel Calparsoro for more than 10 years–beginning with a film called Ausentes (2005) and most recently working on To Steal from a Thief (2016). Here he explains the differences between a storyboard and a shooting board.
-
How to Create an Illustration with Parallax Effect
Add depth and dynamism to an illustration with this step-by-step technique
-
Essential Shortcuts for Mastering Adobe Camera Raw
Speed up your photography workflow with these Adobe Camera Raw shortcuts Raw photos are non-processed images, files that contain all the information that your camera is capable of capturing. One of the best tools for importing and editing these raw images is Adobe Camera Raw, a native Adobe plug-in for working with Raw files in both Photoshop and Lightroom, and a tool that has become indispensable for professional photographers. It is advisable to use Camera Raw whenever you are working with these types of files since its purpose is to recover all the information that the camera saved for processing the image. Then, you will be able to use any Photoshop or Lightroom editing tool on it. To increase your productivity when using the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in, use these basic keyboard shortcuts, and download a PDF file below.
-
Teacher PhotographyPhotoshop Tutorial: Basic Clone Stamp Tips
Learn the basic Clone Stamp options and how to use them when retouching photos with Alain Perdomo The Clone Stamp is a very useful tool for photo retouching in Photoshop, but it is important to use it correctly and know all the customization options that the software allows us. Digital artist Alain Perdomo (@alainperdomo) shares these tips to get the most out of it. You can see the tutorial here:
-
5 Essential Courses on Growth Marketing for Creatives
Learn to optimize your digital content and discover how to attract users who are interested in your products and services To increase your number of followers on social media and optimize your content on the internet, we need to get to grips with the latest marketing trends and keep up to date with the best ways to grow your business online. This is where growth marketing comes in–an essential discipline for creatives that encompasses different techniques that you can learn by enrolling onto the following courses: Google Ads and Facebook Ads from Scratch, a course by Arantxa & Guille When it comes to optimizing content and achieving a good ranking, Google has forever been the king of the jungle, while Facebook has ruled social media. In this course, Arantxa Beltrán and Guillermo Medina will show you how to squeeze as much potential out of each platform as possible for your ideas to stand out. This will help your target market find your business as a result of their searches.
-
Colorize Translates Words into Colors
This website can translate any word of any language into a color with its corresponding hex code
-
José Rosero: The Infinite Possibilities of Illustration
Editorial is just one of the many fields in which José Rosero feels comfortable working as an illustrator José Rosero (@rosero) is a Colombian visual artist whose graphic talents are so varied, it’s impossible to list them all. While he has worked as a painter, in theater, teaching, management, and research, it is as an illustrator that he has achieved his highest levels of success and built up an impressive career. This choice of career path has never narrowed his work opportunities, in fact, it has done the opposite. He considers being an illustrator a bit like being a platypus–in that it's made up of different parts of other animals–since you have to be able to speak different languages, all at the same time. Here’s how Rosero has used illustration across different mediums:
-
7 Dos and Don'ts for High Impact Presentations
Katya Kovalenko helps boost our presentations and projects with visual examples Katya Kovalenko (@katyakovalenko) is a presentation and data designer based in Barcelona. After working for advertising and communications agencies for ten years, she founded her own business, dedicated to helping small and medium-sized businesses convert their ideas into real brands around the world. Her work combines data analysis with aesthetics, as well as good practices in the use of data to build stories from visual resources. For her, this is the basis for building effective presentations.Today, she shares these design-related lessons that will help you create your own powerful materials to show the world your projects.
-
5 Screen Printing Artist That Will Inspire You
Learn about the best screen printing artists on Instagram as chosen by the Domestika community
-
7 of Our Favorite Children's Illustrators
Discover seven of the most talented artists to illustrate our childhoods Kids are a demanding bunch and illustrating for them isn’t as simple as you might think. There are masters of the craft whose hands have created visual worlds that have captivated and calmed young minds for decades. Here is a look at seven of the most celebrated children’s illustrators and their wonderful artwork. Quentin Blake The scrawling illustrations of Quentin Blake are inseparable from Roald Dahl and the stories he wrote, ostensibly, for children. In 2008, David Walliams, of Little Britain fame, managed to persuade Blake to use his inimitable style to illustrate his book The Boy in the Dress, the story about a young boy who likes to crossdress and the reactions this provokes in his friends and family.
-
What Is Punch Needle and How Is It Different to Other Embroidery Styles?
Embroiderer Laura Ameba tells the origins and characteristics of punch needle Laura Ameba (@lauraameba) is an embroiderer who started out in traditional embroidery and haute couture in Barcelona, Paris, and Kyoto. Her love for punch needle and embroidery has taken her and her art to exhibitions around the world. Here, she shares what punch needle is: a technique that allows you to create beautiful three-dimensional effects and rich textures.
-
Kultnation: Influences That Forged His Professional Style
Learn about the illustrators, painters, and animators who inspired his artwork
-
Teacher IllustrationIllustration Tutorial: How to Refine Drawings of Urban Objects and People
Learn the basics of how to enrich an architectural illustration by including different elements like urban objects and people, with Carlo Stanga Creating an architectural illustration is more than just mastering straight lines and buildings. Being able to fill these compositions with local details, through distinctive objects and people from that place, is key to being able to capture a location’s atmosphere. In this video, architectural illustrator Carlo Stanga (@carlo_stanga) explains how to prepare and sketch urban people and objects, which you can later include in your final composition. From how to use them to create depth, to why they’re so key in giving life to your illustrations, here he shares his own process for how to create these studies of objects and people to create engaging and unique architectural illustrations.
-
Teacher DesignFree Download: Restaurant Menu Template
Customize this menu template with your designs and see how they look in real life When it comes to showing your designs to your client (or the world!) there is nothing like presenting them as a mockup to give an idea of how they would be applied in real life. Designers often have a very clear idea about how their final products will look, but when it comes time to show it to others, it's not so easy for their imagination to flow in the same way. To make sure others see your designs the way you do, Lane Cope and Sofía Vargas, creative directors and founders of the Heavy (@heavy) design studio, have shared this restaurant menu template with Domestika.
-
Instagram Competitions and Giveaways: How to Use Hashtags Correctly?
Learn how to use Instagram hashtags to tag your content and monitor the results The first thing you should consider before learning how to hashtag correctly is what hashtags are. A hashtag is a label that allows us to find and monitor content. Practically everyone uses hashtags in their Instagram publications, but it is a particularly useful tool when talking about actions, contests, and lotteries run by brands, for example. Communication and social media strategist consultant Núria Mañé (@nuriacomunica) explains everything we need to know about using hashtags properly: Types of hashtags - Generic. They can be used by any user and usually have many associated publications. It is extremely difficult to monitor any content through them. Still, they are very useful to associate a profile, a brand, or a product with the most popular trends or hashtags. - Corporate or branded. They usually carry the name of the brand or project for which they have been created and are used to position a product or promotion. They can be specific, your own, or a campaign’s and are created to monitor the participation in an activity or a competition.
-
How to Create a Portrait in Photoshop in 8 Easy Steps
Spanish illustrator Elena Pancorbo gives a quick tutorial for portraiture in Photoshop
-
Teacher ArtPuño Recommends: José Antonio Suárez Londoño
Get inspired by the refined work of this influential Colombian cartoonist José Antonio Suárez Londoño is, until someone proves otherwise, the best artist in Colombia. The funny thing is that Suárez Londoño apparently draws without characters and without history. I say "apparently" because that is his story. He spends his life drawing anything: all the plants in Doña Gloria's garden, something he found in an old photograph, some mathematical game applied to drawing, endless variations of the same object... or whatever.
-
Interior Design vs. Interior Decorating: What’s The Difference?
Learn the difference between these two interdependent, often confused, but very different disciplines The work of interior designers and interior decorators is often confused: most people use the terms interchangeably. However, these two roles differ far more than you probably think. Interior designers are responsible for designing the functional spaces and frameworking within which the interior decorator can play, adding the personality and style of their clients. The skills required for the jobs can overlap as their projects will all require: a lot of research and development; creativity to turn that work into a plan; communication between clients, contractors, and whoever else might be involved; an ability to visualize the final product and predict the challenges or benefits it could throw up and; of course, a fundamental knowledge of the history of art, architecture, and design.
-
What Is Facebook Business Manager and What Advantages Does It Offer
This tool allows you to optimize the way you communicate with your followers on social networks Facebook started out as a social network designed to connect people, but, over time, it has also shaped the way we interact with brands. Increasingly, companies have found a niche for themselves on Facebook, and the platform has adapted to their communication needs by creating tools such as Facebook Business Manager. What is Facebook Business Manager? In 2014, Facebook launched a tool that allowed companies to create pages and manage their marketing strategies within the social network. With it, Facebook Business Manager was born and with it a whole range of possibilities when working with company pages and advertiser accounts.
-
Catalina Estrada: How She Broke Into the Illustration World
Learn how she discovered her illustration side after collaborating on social projects and ended up working with big international clients
-
Believe It or Not, UX Design Is a 6000-Year-Old Skill
What do Walt Disney, Leonardo Da Vinci, or Apple have in common? UX is behind some of their best creations UX, short for user experience, is one of the hottest fields in digital design. The exact definition of what it is will vary widely depending on who you ask, but a good way to sum it up is that UX is the process of designing a product or service that resonates with the user and their needs. Designer Ethan Parry (@ethanparry) has worked with major brands such as Meliá Hotels International, SEAT, and Dunia in this field. He has also led workshops for businesses such as KPMG, Accenture, El Corte Inglés, and Hola Magazine, so it is safe to say he is a real UX expert.
-
What Is The Brush Pen?
Many calligraphers and lettering artists consider the brush pen their favorite tool. Today, we will explain to you what it is and how to choose one Used primarily in calligraphy, the brush pen is a favorite tool for those who work with letters. What is a brush pen, you say? It is a marker with a synthetic fiber tip that imitates a brush. This allows the artist to obtain different stroke thicknesses in a single movement, varying the pressure exerted on the paper and/or the inclination.
-
Domestika Diary: Lapin
The urban sketcher visits Madrid’s Retiro Park to share his process and capture the Palacio de Cristal Art, at its core, is a form of expression and observation, filtering the outside world to create something that reflects an individual’s own unique viewpoint. Urban sketching is a popular format for those looking to capture and enjoy their surroundings, jotting down everything from travels to faraway lands to scenes of everyday life. A vibrant community of artists, urban sketchers create pieces that offer a unique blend of observation and personal reflection. A pioneer in the online urban sketching community, Lapin (@lapinbarcelona) has published over 30 books, many of which illustrate his travels across the world. In this Domestika Diary, he visits Madrid’s Retiro park to sketch the Palacio de Cristal and talk about his process and why he believes urban sketching is such a powerful format.
-
Adobe Lightroom or Color Correction Software: Which Option Is Better for Retouching Images?
VFX expert Ro Bot shows you Lightroom's retouching capabilities There are many options on the market for color correcting images, photographs, and renders. To learn about the advantages of using Adobe Lightroom and different presets for retouching and post-production of your images, Ro Bot, producer and VFX expert gives you a tour of its features. He then shows you a different software, Fusion, and its different features for color correction:
-
What Is a Pilot and How to Develop One for Your Audiovisual Projects
Learn why creating a good pilot is essential to selling your audiovisual ideas
-
What Is an Artist's Book?
Susana Domínguez explains the definition and value of an artist's book Artistic binding is the answer to a creative need, and Susana Domínguez, an artist devoted to this trade, uses the art of binding to create unique pieces. The artisanal processes she applies are indeed the perfect techniques for binding treasured publications, such as artists' books. In 2017 she was awarded the National Prize for Artistic Binding in Spain. Today, she will teach us what artists' books are, using examples that vary instyle, form, image, and text.
-
5 Essential Courses to Get Started in Illustrated Storytelling
Learn to use illustration as a narrative tool from these experts today Illustration can be as powerful as the written word. Used alongside common narrative forms, it can become an essential tool to reinforce a story and give it nuance and intention. It can also be the absolute protagonist in a narrative. Learn how to visually tell stories with help from 5 experts in the field of illustrated storytelling. They will guide you through the theory and give you practical exercises that will unlock your creativity and help you convey personal emotions and feelings using environments, characters, and worlds. Visual Storytelling with Graphite for Beginners, a course by Siamés Escalante In this course, illustrator Siamés Escalante will share with you the essence of her style. Full of innocence and melancholy, it has propelled her to work with brands such as Vans, Izzi, Telecom, or Disney, among others. Learn with her how to tell stories without using words and build your own visual narrative.
