Shape Language - Mushroom Studies (Patreon)

As I think about how I want to improve my own work, one of the things I often look to is the work of others that I admire and what is it about them that I really like. 

Something that I noticed about the work of people like Maruti Bitamin , Moosekleenex, and even Sfé is that they all have a very distinct shape language. This is a term I borrowed from animation, but when we look at it in terms of these illustrations you can see that each artist has a distinct set of images and motifs that are very clearly their own. They iterate, mutate and evolve these shapes and motifs over time in a way that I find very inspiring, and I was wondering if it was something that I could channel for myself. 

Of course I already do have something of a "shape language" by virtue of the way that I draw -- every artist does -- but I don't feel that it's refined enough that I (or others) could articulate it. So I wanted to drill deeper into it and see if I could refine what makes my work "mine."

I started with these mushroom shapes. In this case I used a book on mushroom foraging that I picked up recently for reference. In each set I'm using a technique that I learned from Tally Nourigat, specifically the way that they will do a gesture drawing from life and then deliberately redraw it once or twice more from memory, bending and exaggerating the shapes.   With this method I'm hoping not only to boost the shapes that can start to form my own personal iconography, but also to boost the mental repertoire of shapes I can pull from. 

I'm going to be developing these a little bit further, so later this month you'll be seeing some colour studies/style tests!