I take a lot of photos and save them in a colour folder on my phone. I have found potential palettes in book shops, supermarkets and even restaurant toilet decor!

I often take photos of colour palettes I’ve seen in galleries and museums. Looking back at photos for this post, I’ve realised that I’m repeatedly drawn to certain colour combinations.

I really love using a limited palette. I love the simplicity and impact it can have and the way it can focus attention on particular things.

If you need to use an image for your art, product, project, or any other reason, check out the Smithsonian's vast collection of Open Access images available under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. I searched "cat," and it returned over 7,000 images, and every one I looked at was terrific.

3c Washington with Cambridge, MA cat face on cover

A found history of illustration.
Modern Illustration is an archive of print from c.1950-1975, collected and documented by illustrator Zara Picken.

5 ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR HACKS to improve your illustrations in Adobe Illustrator CC.

Shape Builder Tool for Beginners: https://youtu.be/AMqc3sRQ_-M

Pen Tool Tutorial for Beginners: https://youtu.be/SlUZaoGO9zU

• Sketch and gather references
• Use the tools Illustrator has to offer
• Plan out your color palette
• Add contrasting shadows and highlights

What I love about Draw.io is its ability to use editable PNGs — an image containing the raw diagram data.

This allows you to publish a self-contained image file. And as the diagram is contained within the image, anybody with Draw.io can update it.

The PNG image file format supports embedded metadata in a number of ways. diagrams.net can export a PNG image of your diagram and include the diagram itself in the image, by including the XML code in the zTxt section of the image file.

Embedding the diagram as metadata in an image lets you more easily transfer the file between products, vendors, and platforms without data loss. By including the diagram, the image retains all of the data necessary to continue working on it in diagrams.net editor.

Antonio Stappaerts is a professional concept artist and teacher. In this video, he’ll detail his six steps on how you can learn to draw anything and provide you with a better understanding of form, design, and structure. You’ll learn how to break down complex subjects into simple shapes, the importance of shape design, and get some valuable tips on manipulating basic shapes to make them more dynamic and interesting. If you’ve been trying to draw the world around you (or from imagination) and your artwork is not living up to your expectations, then this lesson will really help you out.

• Structuralization - Drawing basic shapes in groups from different perspectives
• Manipulation - Bend and shape forms and contours
• Observation - Mannequinize
• Education
• Imitation
• Imagination

Award-winning artist Mikhail Solovev shows you how to create a compositional sketch in the Russian academic style. These sketches are a key part of the Russian academic process, and begin by focusing on the silhouette to get a good idea of the compositional elements of light and shadow in your piece. If you’re interested in learning more about how to draw in a Russian academic style check out Mikhail’s course - https://proko.com/solovev

"Many people are too lazy to draw a compositional sketch first." Spend 15 minutes doing one first.

Drawing from more advanced students' work is more helpful than drawing from the Masters. The work is more understandable and allows you to incrementally improve. Drawing with pen and ink really shows you what you know. Mistakes are learning tools!

Excellent blog post by James Edmonson (OHNO Type Co.) about vectoring letters, with invaluable tips for both lettering and type design.

Drawing Vectors for Type & Lettering | OH no Type Company

Can also recommend this series of posts by him about drawing letters in general; it’s filled with tips and important content but communicated visually and in a chill way.

Scott Biersack’s step-by-step tutorial of how he used to go about vectoring his letterings
https://design.tutsplus.com/tutorials/hand-lettering-how-to-vector-your-letterforms--cms-23248

Great tutorial by Glyphs about drawing with béziers showcasing good practices:

Drawing Good Paths | Glyphs

Article by type designer Fábio Martins going deeper into how bézier curves are made and how they behave:

Bézier Curves and Type Design: A Tutorial | Learn - Scannerlicker!

So What’s the Big Deal with Horizontal & Vertical Bezier Handles Anyway?

Dave Coleman’s blog post commenting the importance of keeping anchors in extrema and handles horizontal and vertical, showing examples of how other professionals vectored their letters and also how they used exceptions to that “rule”

So What's the Big Deal with Horizontal & Vertical Bezier Handles Anyway?

Adé Hogue

Bézi-yay! - Adé Hogue

https://web.archive.org/web/20211221173728/https://www.adehogue.com/journal/2019/10/23/beziermethod

Arrow Type’s Instagram post with a sped-up video of him building sans serif letters in Glyphs, showing how he uses parts of already drawn letters to build up other letters.

Illustrator

Illustrator's Pen Tool: The Comprehensive Guide

Vetorizani com Saiani

Series of mini-tutorials by Plau’s Rodrigo Saiani, with invaluable tips and tricks about Illustrator and letter vectoring (it’s narrated in Portuguese but you can probably grasp things by just watching the visuals).

BOOKS

Leslie Cabarga - Logo, Font & Lettering Bible

Logo Font & Lettering Bible

The book is a bit old, but has overall great content about drawing letterforms. Around page 130 there’s a specific part about letter vectoring tips in Illustrator.

COURSES

Phaedra Charles - Hand Lettering Styles and Techniques for Embellishment

Hand Lettering Styles and Techniques for Embellishment | Phaedra Charles | Skillshare

Marta Cerdà - Characters with Character

Online course - Characters with Character (Marta Cerdà Alimbau)

“Not a day without a line”, or in its latin version “Nulla dies sine linea”. It comes from the Ancient Greece painter Apelle (4th century BC), who was one of the most famous of his time.

It enables one to steadily build and strengthen one’s unique relationship with creativity. At the intersection between the art of habits (doing something regularly — every day here) and the habits of art (drawing or writing lines), I find this motto to empower core aspects of the relationship to drawing practice:

• Befriending creativity by focusing on regular process over outcome
• Improving one’s craft by focusing on quantity over quality
• Creating one’s very own art by weaving life and art
• Going to the essence of expressiveness in a single line

TUTOR TUESDAY INDEX Hey, friends! Here’s a handy little index to help you find tutorials you might be looking for! Drawing Exercises Part 1 Drawing Exercises Part 2 Foundations: • Visualizing in 3D •...

In 2019 I took a course called Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. Throughout the course I illustrated summaries of the main concepts which you can find below.

Browse and download high-resolution, public domain Paintings, Drawings, Illustrations and Posters.

sources:
https://artvee.com/about-us/

Learn how to draw freeform tree trunks & roots with The Etherington Brothers! Grow your trees boldly & add visual details such as bark patterns & wood grain.

Game-board; wooden, originally hollow; top covered with 20 inlaid square shell plaques; edges made of small plaques and strips, some sculptured with an eye and some with rosettes; on the back are three lines of triangular shell ornamental inlays set as part of the modern reconstruction.

An open directory of female* illustrators

Find out how to capture compelling gestures in your wire armatures! In this lesson, I'll show you how you can push your wire armatures to a whole new level by experimenting with gesture and expression.

• https://www.posespace.com/
• Gesture first!
• Strike the pose! Where is your head? balance?
• Exaggerate
• Three primary masses of the body: head, ribcage, pelvis
• Bridgeman "Drawing from Life"

Graphic designer Eugène Grasset’s 1897 book, Plants and Their Application to Ornament, vividly demonstrates the ways in which nature was distilled into popular decorative motifs at the end of the 19th-century.

In July, 2011, several members of the BHL staff began putting illustrations from BHL books on Flickr. It started as a simple way to flag favorite staff images and document the illustrations we were…