watermelon helmet season
SUMMER 2024

That's it. You've finished second year and are looking down the barrel of 4 months of nothingness before embarking on your final year. 

The last thing you want to do is spend those months ignoring your illustration practice.
Summer's here. We're luxuriating beneath clear blue skies and glorious, uninterrupted sunshine; bird song and the hum of honey bees drifts across flower dappled meadows where children play (it's grey and raining and my children haven't taken their eyes from their phone screens since April).

Summer break always represent a long pause in proceedings. A few of you have asked what you can do over summer to continue your skills development, or at the very least avoid that thing where you come back in September and have forgotten what it is you're doing and how to do it (like at school when it would take the first fortnight after summer to re-learn how to hold a pencil).

With that in mind here's our advice:

​1. Draw
Lots of drawing from reference. Fill sketchbooks. Have fun.

2. Look
Get inspired and informed by spending time looking and finding out about illustrators, artists, designers. The internet is quite good for this (who'd have thought?). Don't just 'like' your favourite artists on instagram. Reflect on what you need to improve and identify artists who do that well. Be a connoisseur. 

​3. Personal Projects
Give yourself a project or two to work on. These can be fun, playful, silly. You don't need to worry about 'intended learning outcomes' or any of that sort of thing; the important thing is to be engaging with your subject, creating work and being an illustrator.

4. Think Ahead
This one's for the second years moving to third year.
Think about what sort of illustrator you want to be, what area or areas of industry you're interested in. 
This doesn't mean that whatever you decide now will stick for life; but it will provide you with direction for third year - safe in the knowledge that most of you will end up heading in different directions in the longterm anyway.

1. draw

We would recommend as much observational drawing as possible. Don't think that without exciting subjects to draw that you can't produce interesting work and, most importantly, learn and develop your skills.

2. Look

There's no shortage of places to look. In addition to instagram and other image based websites, don't forget about documentaries (Youtube, BBC iPlayer, Netflix, Amazon etc) as well as some of the great illustration, art, design and drawing channels on Youtube.

Cartoonist Kayfabe

The audio/visual inside-scoop from master comic makers Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg.

Sketching with Lucy

New Drawing with Lucy videos available from 07:00 every Friday. Next five videos will be all about UK insects. All photos and film used in my Draw Along vide...

Our Painted Lives

Our Painted Lives is an invitation to watch and paint along in daily painting exercises, Monday thru Friday. Join us!

Proko

Hey there! My name is Stan Prokopenko, I'm an artist and teacher. Proko is a resource for artists to get good art instruction videos. When you watch Proko tu...

ILLUSTRATION AGE

Books Directory of Illustration 36 is a Thing of Organic Beauty

3. personal projects

A personal project will mean you always have something to do, something to work toward and will help you to avoid sitting staring at the dreaded blank page without any ideas of what to do. It can be a full blown illustration project that requires research and development (illustrated book) or it can be a simple task that helps you pick a subject to draw (draw all of the objects in your room),

If you're a second year moving into third year, the projects you begin working on now can be presented (and graded) in your final portfolio next summer. This means if you begin working now, you can start your final semester with your portfolio already underway!

​Here are some examples...
Illustrator Paul Rogers has been drawing 1 image per page of Jack Kerouac's 'On The Road' and posting them to this dedicated instagram page.
How about book jackets based on songs and the artists who perform them? (Karl James Mountford).
Or some zines...

SUMMER PROJECT PADLETS

You know how much we love a bit of padlet action. Here's two padlets for you, on the left you can post inspiration and ideas for summer projects - could be embedded social media posts, other peoples work, competitions etc. On the right, you can share your own work with each other. We've turned comments on, so you can also give feedback etc.

Beneath the padlets, you'll find the HTML code to embed them on your own site. This way you can create a summer specific page and use it as your own one-stop-shop to summer success.

Made with Padlet


​HTML EMBED CODE FOR ABOVE PADLETS

Copy the following code and paste it into a 'Embed Code' box on your weebly site.​

<div class="padlet-embed" style="border: 1px solid rgba(0,0,0,0.1); border-radius: 2px; box-sizing: border-box; overflow: hidden; position: relative; width: 100%; background: #F4F4F4;">
<p style="padding: 0; margin: 0;"><iframe width="320" height="240" style="width: 38%; height: 1000px; display: inline-block; padding: 0; margin: 0;" src="https://cumbriauni.padlet.org/embed/y9dndmchz0jmuz1o" frameborder="0" allow="camera;microphone;geolocation"></iframe> <iframe width="320" height="240" style="width: 61%; height: 1000px; display: inline-block; padding: 0; margin: 0;" src="https://cumbriauni.padlet.org/embed/dq8mbp7dxp3cd0i8" frameborder="0" allow="camera;microphone;geolocation"></iframe></p>
<div style="padding: 8px; text-align: right; margin: 0;"><a href="https://padlet.com?ref=embed" style="padding: 0; margin: 0; border: none; display: block; line-height: 1; height: 16px;" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img src="https://padlet.net/embeds/made_with_padlet.png" width="86" height="16" style="padding: 0; margin: 0; background: none; border: none; display: inline; box-shadow: none;" alt="Made with Padlet" /></a></div>
</div>