Illustration Techniques to Unlock your Creativity

Taking chances, making mistakes, playing, going beyond your limits, and being free are all starting points for developing your imagination, language, and voice.

In this course, illustrator Adolfo Serra teaches you, step by step, the processes to experiment and unlock your creativity with manual techniques that will help you create a freehand illustrated sketchbook.

A sketchbook functions as a photo library (arranged by objects, animals, vegetation, characters, buildings, and any other categories the student decides on), and also as a record of pictorial resources, techniques, experiments, or processes.

This is Adolfo Serra's second course with Domestika, in which he focused on the world of children's books. In this course, he branches out to include techniques and processes for anyone who wants to illustrate by getting their hands dirty with manual processes.

Start by getting to know Adolfo Serra, his work, and illustrations. Learn about his professional career, his projects, and the books he has published as well as his point of view on illustration and the work of an artist. He reflects on what it means to have a unique style and voice as an illustrator. Do you need to have a unique style? Can you have different resources or pictorial styles? Can you change your style according to the project?

With the objective being to find your own voice as an illustrator, use a sketchbook throughout the course. Fill it with freehand illustrations using the various techniques that are taught in this course.

Then, Adolfo gives you guidelines and exercises to encourage creativity, develop your creative process, and feed your imagination, through other types of images or resources that could prove useful in the development of your work.

Build your own version of a photo library; a visual world from your imagination or creative and graphic resources.

Learn new manual techniques using pens, watercolor pencils, markers, waxes, and paint with natural pigments.

Discover new styles when you mix techniques, change tools or a combination of both. Can an illustrator use multiple resources? Does your stroke change according to different tools or are there limitations?

By learning these techniques, begin to illustrate by playing and step away from creating anything automatically. Open your mind to new styles, make mistakes, and search for new approaches.

At the end of the course, you will have had the chance to experiment with different techniques and processes that will help you to develop your illustrations. You will also have ventured into your personal pictorial universe by creating an illustrated notebook that will function as a resource guide for future projects or as a starting point for new stories, posters, illustrations, tales, or stories.

Following the exercises, create an artist's sketchbook where you have free rein of creative processes, research, characters, and techniques.

Not only will it serve you in your search for how to draw illustrate, but it will also work as a record or library of your evolution as an illustrator. Additionally, you can use it as a reference whenever you need it.

For illustrators, draftsmen, designers, teachers, and lovers of art in general in search of new forms of expression, techniques, or manual tools to create illustrations.

This is a course for anyone who enjoys creating and is not afraid to get their hands dirty, including illustrators who are looking for new techniques or designers wanting to get away from the computer.

No prior knowledge of drawing is necessary. To complete this course, the only prerequisite is the desire to create and experiment.

You will need a mixed media sketchbook so that you can use various tools and materials: watercolor pencils, markers, nib, ink, greasy waxes, solvent, turpentine, and natural pigments such as walnut ink, caobina, and turmeric. It would also be helpful to have a small box of watercolors and brushes.