10 Minute Covid-19 Procreate Practice

Here’s a little exercise I gave myself to practice, to keep myself motivated and creative, as well as trying to put a smile on peoples face whilst in lockdown.

As a designer, it’s always important to keep yourself motivated, creative, and inspired. Unfortunately being locked in a house, for me anyway, has really put a pin on the opportunities to go out and get some inspiration. So I’m going to share with you a little project I gave myself last week, to give myself a chance to practice, and stay creative. So it started out as a little simple sketch last week, and escalated into something I kicked off each day with.

So, I’ll give you a little overview of where it all came from. Here is the first illustration I started with. I was actually just drawing a little illustration of a cactus for the Lol’s. Then, at the end, added a little tagline ‘Don’t be a prick’, because a fellow designer was annoying me, and I thought it’d be funny if I sent it to him over Slack.

don’t be a prick

From there I decided I would start floating through the internet looking for other funny memes for objects and animals that I could illustrate in a similar way. So, I decided to put a pin in the style, the stroke weight, shading techniques, font style, background etc. so that they’d all work together consistently. And here is where I got to with them all.

Obviously I didn’t come up with these quirky titles myself 🤣. I think overall, some work, some not so good, but at the end of the day, they were all just purely for practice.

One restriction I gave myself was to time-box myself. I’d only spend 10 mins on each one. Simplicity was key. I didn’t want to spend all day on these. I just wanted to use them to give me some encouragement each morning. Then I’d have something to share socially on Instagram, Linkedin, Facebook etc, just something to try put a smile of people’s face whilst in lockdown.

make cool shit

money can’t buy life (Bob Marleys final words on this earth)

just bee happy

be helpful

slow down

don’t carrot all

be a fungi

So that’s it. Like I said, this is all throw away stuff. Just something to give me a way to create, smile and spam 😂. I find a lot of times designers are way too serious. Go ahead, try out a similar project yourself. You’ll be surprised how much fun it is to create something just for fun.

Here is the full series in all it’s glory. I probably should have kept going with these, they were so much fun. But I’ve already kicked off another little series so watch this space…

Come join the new Slack for Illustrators!

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https://join.slack.com/t/illustrators-talk/shared_invite/zt-f3ynx78z-328oIARU6RqVnilrbouTng

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