How sketching “mini studies" helps this artist defeat the blank canvas

I’ve always been into art and wanted to create something colourful and fun. I grew up around art at home. Both of my parents are artists themselves. We my parents are artists themselves. We have always had – and they still have I would always sneak sheets of paper my parents are artists themselves.

We have always had – and they still have – an art studio at home. I would always sneak sheets of paper and Micron pens from my dad to draw from shoujo manga and Sailor Moon. I loved the characters and the magic of the worlds they were in, so I would create my own characters and stories for them.

As I got online, I began to see the work of artists from all over the world. That exposed me to so many different styles and techniques that I wanted to learn myself and replicate within my own artwork.

I started to take art more seriously as I got into my 20s. After spending a few years in a fine art program in college. I began to gravitate to character design and illustration. I focused on creating fun, engaging characters that, to me, told their own interesting stories. The visual language using shapes, colours, clothing, expressions and settings truly captures me and is always something I continue to work towards.

I think I’ve always loved things that are cute and colourful! It’s something I love to include in my art. I’m inspired a lot by the early 2000s and the over the-top feeling of that decade.

The darker side of my work is something that I intentionally added in as an experiment initially, but over time has become one of my favourite elements to add! I enjoy taking my love for all things cute and colourful, and mixing it in with something more like a campy horror film. There’s something fun about combining those two concepts.

I currently have a studio setup at home that I share with my husband, who likes to game. We didn’t do much with it until last year when I made the space more comfortable and creative for me.

I added a colourful mural on one wall, new shelving for supplies, hanging up art prints from artists who I enjoy, and getting a standing desk, which helped complete my perfect little art den right at home.

When I want some time out of the house, I like to take my iPad out on the go with Procreate. It’s fun to grab a cappuccino at my favourite coffee shop and just doodle while taking in the sights and sounds all around me. I usually have my noise-cancelling headphones on and like to listen to music, mostly electronic and pop, or anything that has a fun beat to it.

I recently got into more fantasy novels, so I’ve also been listening to a lot of audiobooks! I notice that I begin to sketch up the characters from these stories. So it’s more something to listen to during a relaxed sketchbook session and not working on a major project.

I find that sketching, both digitally and traditionally, is more of a meditative exercise for me and can be an unstructured process. It’s more finalised piece, I get stuck and frozen by the pressure of the idea.

A lot of my meditative exercise for me and can be an unstructured process. It’s more where I go if I’m trying out a new technique, doing some fun studies, or playing around with my supplies and tools. If I go into it thinking of a finalised piece, I get stuck and frozen by the pressure of the idea. A lot of my sketches are just random doodles of characters I’ve done when I have a moment to sit for a bit.

My digital sketches particularly will tend to be where I’m a little more structured. But I’m more experimental with concepts, since I can copy and paste, move pieces around with the Lasso tool, and edit colours at will.

I like to pull random references or drawing challenges and work from there. Sometimes it’s various animals or interesting poses that I find. A lot of these turn into most of my final pieces! With one piece that I recently finished, I started playing around with some floating poses while I was at comic-con. It eventually became a fully rendered piece once I returned home.

My biggest thing right now is shape language. I try to get the initial shapes down during the first few lines and sketches. It’s all rough and messy, but if the shape of the character’s pose, or the composition of the image is there, it’s readable to me.

I then tend to do a second pass over with more details, making sure not to cover up any of the foundational shapes but reinforce them. Traditionally, that would be with a darker, softer pencil or some ink. Digitally I’d use a new layer on top of the initial sketch at a lower opacity.

If I’m adding colour to a sketch, I like to start off with a main base colour and then play around with the hue and saturation of different spots. My colour rules tend to be one or two bright and punchy colours, with everything else complementing the main colour. I’ll add a touch more variation to hues in areas that I want to focus more on, for example the facial expressions.

Since this is more of an intuitive process for me, I gravitate towards the cheerful things first before I begin to twist them around. I want to play with the expressions, the overall shape of the pose, the movement – all of that.

I try to achieve this by keeping my sketches very rough and loose at the beginning. As I start to get a clearer idea, I’ll begin to tighten up my sketch. This is where I’ll add in some of the darker and crazier elements to my sketches, such as extra arms, fangs, and all sorts of fun, spooky things.

It depends on the character that I’m working on or drawing. Most of the time I have some idea of the world or the basic character traits that I reference in my own head. I think the world that a character exists in does play a huge role in who that character is, from their choice of clothing to their attitudes. It’s something I keep in mind as I work.

One group of characters – Valentine, Phoebe and Astrid – are cosmic magic girls from another world. They’re all fishes-out-of-water with magical aura. When I sketch them, their story has them be a bit impassive, less expressive, but also more heroic and benevolent. I like to draw them as classic movie monsters too, where they’re a little more chaotic and more expressive.

This is more instinctual for me! I enjoy playing around with clichés. I think they’re instantly readable and easy to understand. For example, it starts with me deciding if I want to draw a witch – something I know visually and easy to put down either on paper or a new canvas in Procreate.

As I’m sketching out different poses, I’m asking myself, “What if it’s a witch, but they’re also grocery shopping?” or, “Do they have a cat with them?” to come up with new scenarios to put this character in.

I do the same thing with character expressions. It’s less about drawing a character being happy, sad, or angry, it’s more, “This character is staring at their creepy double. Are they really freaked out or slightly amused?”

I really want to get into more of the fantasy archetypes and characters. I’m a big fan of Dungeons & Dragons and have spent far too many hours playing Baldur’s Gate 3 as well. Since I’ve been getting in to fantasy novels at lot more recently, it’s a theme that I really want to explore in my artwork!

I want to try and play around with more medieval fashion and costumes from all over the world. It also opens up new creatures and fun magical elements. My main goal with that is to create characters or illustrations that are based on D&D classes.

I’m also into fitness outside my art. I love to run long distances and powerlift, so I want to start playing around with muscle structure and athleticism, and bringing in some of my feelings and struggles as a gym rat. It sort of brings my two separate passions together in its own way.

I want to say work on your passions and really get engaged with them. Find yourself in your artwork, whether that be through using the mediums that you enjoy the most, or the subjects you love to draw above all others. That isn’t to say you shouldn’t focus on your fundamental skills and draw out of your comfort zone.

I think those are just as important to learn and can add a better foundation to your work. It’s similar to fitness in a way for me – find the art you love to make and really get into it!

Discover what your comfort zone is and what you enjoy about your process the most. Then find some time to still work on the things that support it, such as the anatomy, values, the composition and the shape language through studies. Try to draw consistently, balancing between the two. You don’t need to draw every single day – you need your rest days as well – but try to create a schedule that works for you.