So I was about to write a blog post about an ongoing personal project, but I found myself constantly postponing both the writing and the posting of any of the finished illustrations from the project even though I’ve considered them ready for at least 2 months now. I started asking myself what’s wrong. Is it laziness or is there something about those illustrations that doesn’t work for me. Turns out it’s the second.

For a while now I’ve been doing most of my digital illustrations in a very clean and simplified style, unless I was feeling particularly fancy. I don’t enjoy spending time on details and managing to communicate with the minimum amount of clutter makes me happy, but lately I feel that something is lacking in that approach and the results turn out somewhat boring. I am not yet sure whether there’s a transition in style coming for me or is this an issue only with the particular project I was working on. At the same time another illustration job, which is going on at the moment works nicely in an extremely flat and simplified style, so I’m getting to the conclusion that every illustration is just different, has its own life and demands and one style will not always fit all… which only makes my quest for defining my personal expression even more messy and confusing.

Since I want to keep the personal project I mentioned offline for the moment I’ll use another illustration as a case study. It’s a quick sketch from last Friday I did while waiting for some documents to get saved (great time for a quick doodle if the Internet doesn’t steal it from you). It was one of my tiny dancers- they seem to be my default “instant doodle”. Later that night I decided to throw on some color. I just jumped in without putting too much thought into it and did my usual routine- outline the shapes with pen tool, fill the shapes with solid color, and play around with color combinations. Done! Except this one felt as boring as hollow as those previous ones I mentioned. Despite my doubts I left it as is, went to bed and forgot about it.

Yesterday that same illustration came back to haunt me, so I opened the illustrator file and started playing around with it. After a while of mindless and fruitless messing around I made myself define some of the things I liked and disliked about the illustration.

Inspiration came from another set of illustrations I’ve been working on lately. The client wanted something with a messier sketch- like feel to it. So I thought why not, let’s go for that and started turning shapes back to strokes and giving them sketch effects. I followed the flow till I got to something a little more interesting, but still simple enough with a nice stylized feeling to it and a dip of sketchy chaos. I felt like the style was working much better now, but wasn’t quite there yet.

After staring at it for a while longer and tweaking it, I decided to remove those liquid hair thingies. I also noticed that her body was shaded as if the light source was behind her, while her jumpsuit and hair were still lit from the front. I always go for the simplest lighting which makes for a boring illustration and it is something I need to work on. Especially would love to experiment more with backlight and two light sources, which are probably my favorite.

I try to avoid black, it is too lifeless color (not color), so I changed the black outlines to faded ashy grey and gave the shadows bluish tint. I also brought back the yellow “sun” spot and gave it rough sketch-like outlines. It still didn’t feel quite finished, as if it was missing a cheesy quote or inspirational message… So I made up one! Enjoy!

I’m still not entirely sure that I have found the style for my project, I’ll need to let it simmer for few days at least before I decide, but it certainly feels a little more new and fresh to me and I’d love to play with it some more soon…

What do you think? How do you figure out the right expression for your illustrations? Do you always stick with your own style or are you still searching for “the one”?