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Free Sketching

Lesson 18 from: Symbol Design for Branding

Mitchel Hunt

Free Sketching

Lesson 18 from: Symbol Design for Branding

Mitchel Hunt

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Lesson Info

18. Free Sketching

Lesson Info

Free Sketching

the first technique we're going to use is free sketching and it's the most straightforward way to get a mass amount of visual ideas on the paper. What you'll need is a large sketch pad or paper, a pencil and a sharpie. Alright, so what we're gonna do here is I like to call this sort of the visual version of mind mapping, right? So I'm calling it free sketching. You can call it whatever you want, but it's really just trying to get again as many ideas out on paper. But we're gonna do it instead with little sketches to get started. What we're gonna do is we're just gonna draw a couple of lines here with our pencil. Mhm. And we're gonna do some horizontal here. And what we're doing here is we're just creating um sort of grid that that gives us a lot of tiny little canvases that we can draw on. And the good thing about this is that it's quick and dirty, right? So that's one of the reasons I want you drawing with a sharpie because with a sharpie, you can create something that has a little bi...

t of a graphic style, right? You can create a very thick lines and very easily mimic graphic shapes um with a sharpie and then the pencil just sort of fades into the background, giving you a sort of a nice grid here. Again, Speaking to this idea of this being a visual mind map. We're gonna go ahead and start sketching things that remind us of our keywords. So what we're going to have to do is draw those keywords on the bottom left hand corner or wherever you want. So I'm remembering that my keywords are magic. Mhm supernatural. Mm hmm. Oddity. Mhm. Unmasked and gathering. So as I'm looking at these words, I'm just trying to think of what comes to mind visually. So again, when I was thinking of magic sort of this idea of a top hat right? Or maybe this idea of a magic wand and sort of these like sparks coming out of it. And again, these are not great illustrations right there just quick little doodles. The point of this is not to make a good design. The point of this is to make a good concept and get it out as quickly as possible. I'm thinking of a broomstick because I'm thinking of witches. Um and these are all pictorial, right? These are all sort of images that represent something in real life. But this is a really good opportunity for you to start thinking out of the box and start thinking abstractly. So when I think of magic, yes, I think about all these pictures. But um you know, I was just alluding to this uh this sort of magic wand with all these sparks coming out. Right, so magic has this sort of ethereal sparky quality to it. This is your chance to get a little bit poetic and just use words that maybe are again associated but not necessarily synonymous. So I'm thinking that magic to me has this sort of sense of mystery and it has a sense of weight. Um so I start thinking about what does that look like, visually, I just think about this big sort of black tenseness and maybe things sort of flowing around it. Right, That to me is mystery, its weight. And so in that sense I can sort of relate it back to the concept of magic and then from there I can iterate, I can use the same sort of idea that its mystery and weight in the center here, but instead of things flowing around it like that, maybe stuff is coming in and out of it. Right, That's why it's not really important to worry about rendering, You're just playing around here. So in the end here you should have quite a few concepts laid out because it's so quickly because it's so easy to iterate quickly on this thing. Um you can generate as many as as you know, hundreds in minutes. So again, I invite you to just create as many as you can relating back to your keywords and then picking out some of your favorites, so that later on you can bring them in to illustrator or start sketching them to be a little bit more robust and then figure out which ones are your favorites and which ones are the most successful

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