I recently took an online course to create some holiday themed art, called Create Christmas by Victoria Johnson. This was such a fun class, full of talented and creative people.
The class is set up in a three week structure, with each week having a theme and a color palette. So each week, I would pull out all of my sketching tools in that color palette and explore the theme in my sketchbook.
I absolutely love the sketchbook spreads that resulted from these experiments.
It was really interesting to me to see how keeping to a specific theme and color palette changed my work completely from week to week. Check out these much more subdued sketches from a different week.
Here you can see all my pens and pencils and markers in the color theme, next to my sketchbook.
This is the design I landed on for that week.
But I also played around with some different colors for it, which I may explore more in a future illustration to get a different feeling for the drawing.
And then the following week, yet again, yielded a completely different style of illustration with a very different feeling.
You can see in this sketchbook spread, it took me a while to land on an idea for this week. But having the theme and colors set helped make a framework that allowed that idea to pop up.
Once I had this idea down, another one came into my head, but she hasn't been completed yet. I may try her in a different color palette, although I do really love the pinks and purples.
I feel like she would be be a good companion for this little lady.
The Create Christmas class with Victoria Johnson was a great experience for me, and I'll absolutely be back to take more classes with her. Her course materials are inspiring, and the other students are absolutely lovely people who are so helpful and encouraging through the process.
Some products from the art in this post:
• Peppermint Snail holiday card
• Catcrackers holiday card
• Peppermint Snail sticker