Finding your own style is damn hard. Your Instagram follows consist of cohesive ‘got their shit together’ designers whose posts all look like they belong in a frame on a cute website where you could spend your entire life savings. It’s tiring endlessly scrolling, seeing people doing the shit that you want to do but don’t even know where to begin, I get it. As I’m sure a lot of inspiring illustrators can agree, copying is usually how you eventually start. Or that’s how it happened for me anyway.
Before I knew that graphic design was the one for me, I did a lot of drawing. In school as part of my GCSE, for each artist you researched, you had to do a copy of one of their pieces. This was all well and good until you get to A Level and copying is no more. You’re simply ‘inspired’ by an artist, maybe by the colour palette you’ve used or the theme behind the image. Moving from becoming completely reliant on copying to doing things solo is like a toddler taking their first steps and then asking them to do a 100m sprint. You become comfortable to say the least.
At sixth form, I took up graphics and found a lot of designers I loved but nothing on their instagrams, websites, behances, about process. Because I’d never done this sort of drawing before, I knew copying was the way to go about it, but it’s anything but easy to make a copy of something if you don’t know how they did it. But then I found Fran.
I found Fran on Instagram (of course) and immediately fell in love. Her illustrations are simple, yet delightful. At the time, she was using black and white line over coloured shapes done using promarkers. I knew this because she was the first illustrator I found to have a Youtube channel and to utilise the story feature on insta to show small drawing videos. I was fascinated, watching her use coloured pencil to sketch out the illustration and then go so confidently over the top with marker and finish with a very precise use of monochromatic line. It seemed so effortless, as easy as tying your shoelaces or getting dressed it the morning. It was like second nature to her and that was I’d been searching for.
I already had an array of promarkers and some well loved fineliners, so I took pen to paper and made some very terrible attempts to copy. Here’s where it gets easy to give up. You see a couple of your shoddy attempts and then convince yourself you’ll never amount to anything in the world and that everyone would just be better off if you never picked up a pencil again. But I needed to be comfortable enough to draw only being inspired by her, so carrying on was the only option. In my gap year (yes it took me this long to get comfy) I did a lot of crappy drawings that I hated, because I knew once I’d got my place at university, summer work would soon be assigned and I had to be good. The task was eventually revealed- we had to creatively portray a day out of our summer however we wanted. This was a pretty good excuse to finally give a crack at my own drawing.
Definitely not my best work, but I was unbelievably relieved to see that the first attempt had kinda worked out. I carried on like this and did a few different arrangements of my day, all of which you can see on my Instagram. At this point I was still giving credit in my captions to Fran because I was still very much attached to her style in terms of colour palette and technique (and artists take credit very VERY seriously). However now I’m doing my own thing. Fran taught me how to draw like this through all of her videos and other good stuff on her platforms, her website is particularly good for showing how she makes her illustrations and the medias she uses. This being said, like a caterpillar to a buttery, I’m now spreading my wings. I still draw in a very similar style, don’ get me wrong, but I think it’s finally becoming my own.
Fran now takes on more of a blue theme in her illustrations, using blue rather than black fineliners, and her physical form has changed a lot since I first found her. She made a super interesting video recently that discussed the changing of her own personal style and how she overcame it. Her Instagram goes back quite a few years, so you can see the style progression. I’m saying I’m finding my style but I guess what I’ve learnt from Fran is that the more you draw the more your style grows and changes, so I know that my illustrations wont be this way forever. On top of all this platform running, she’s also running a super cool business here with her husband Ed where they recycle, print and resell second hand t-shirts.
Fran is one of those Instagram accounts that I envy, but it soon becomes very clear that behind closed doors, she works bloody hard to be as on top of her game as she is. As does every designer with their shit together. A couple of Fran’s links are available if you click the images on this post, as with every designer I mention, if you wanted to check out and delve a bit deeper into the making of illustration. I suppose this post is just a massive fangirl and a bit of a thank you. Everyone has design heroes and here’s one of mine.
Cheers,
Abi x
abigailboreham 