5 Basic Tips for Illustrating

Tips and tricks that most people wouldn’t highlight when illustrating. They’re probably no use to anyone but me…

So, I’m not going to use this article to show you how to use certain techniques or tools to create the perfect illustration. The reason being is that everyone has different way of approaching their process. There is no such thing as the perfect process. I’m going to use this article to highlight some pretty obvious, but probably not the most highlighted tips that people would talk about when they’re trying to illustrate. To me, consistency is key to a holistic illustrative styleguide, and without the following tips, you’ll struggle to create consistency.

The one piece of advice I will give you towards becoming a better illustrator though, and you can use this in any aspect of life, is to practice. It’s a time consuming process, but it’s the best way to learn. It’s the only way I learned. I gave myself personal projects over and over again. All the way until I had a portfolio of illustrations that started to attract potential clients to my illustrative work.

Anyway, back to the point of this article. I wanted to pull out a few key little tricks I learned along the way that should help speed up your flow, as well as help create a consistent illustration, consistency is key.

Note: The majority of the advice here is aimed towards creating a pretty basic stroked product illustration within Adobe Illustrator. When I say that, I mean a generic illustration that uses strokes to dictate the core shape of the structure. See below.

A collection of stroked product illustration

1. Creating a Colour and Stroke Palette

Usually, before you start creating an illustration, you’ve probably outlined a collection of colours based around the brand guidelines that you are working from. It will generally inherit a set of primary colours and various secondary colour. There should be another couple of colours that you should consider too. The stroke colour and a colour for shading. I’d recommend to try earmark exactly what colours you’re using by keeping the palette up to date at all times.

Creating a consistent colour palette with consistent colour usage

Key takeaway: Always create a small colour palette just off the artboard, that has the correct fill and stroke colours as well the correct stroke weights and stroke capping. This will allow for speed when keeping consistency across your illustration.

An example of a colour palette outlining all available styles

2. Shading your illustration

I like to use shading to add depth to my product illustrations. Its not an easy thing to do when you’re generally using flat colours across the palette i.e no gradients. I use a consistent collection of ‘colours’ as my shading options. The stroke should always be the darkest colour used in the illustration, so the shading should be an opacity of the stroke, so that its consistent when sitting alongside the darkest element.