In this selection of illustrations, sketches and other drawings, Paige Vickers demonstrates how having an ongoing habit of continuous sketching can feed in to the core of your style. We particularly focus on her sketchbooks because, apart from being gorgeously interesting in themselves, you can clearly see elements brought through in her other work.
As she goes on to explain below, part of being able to work this way has to be actively encouraged. As much as you might love carrying your pad around, procrastination can get the best of us.
Having personal projects like sketching and posting everyday like Paige can make all the difference. That and drawing inspiration from an ever-moving city, as she talks about here.
This is my humble workspace in my apartment on the edge of Brooklyn, New York. I work late into the night on personal and freelance illustration projects, but during the week I am a designer and illustrator for a boutique stationer and design house in Chelsea.
I work on a lot of private client wedding invitations and spend the best parts of my days drawing fun, saturated maps to be letterpress printed. Here, I work mostly in illustrator and digitally compose and color scanned pencil drawings.
The nature of letterpress forces me to be extremely strict with my color palette, using a limited Pantone selection.
In my own studio, I use a combination of brush and ink, graphite, crayon and whatever is closest to make textural black and white drawings then color everything digitally in Photoshop (to retain more nuances than I can achieve in illustrator).
I recently have been holding myself to sketching at least once a day and posting to Tumblr; this way I can weed through more of my terrible ideas to get down to the really juicy ones.
It’s nice to add your city into your process as well. Since I work digitally, I can draw components of an illustration anywhere the mood strikes then add to them or edit down once I’m calm and collected in my studio. It doesn’t hurt that New York has a ton of excitement to offer and countless museums, parks and beautiful humans to be inspired by!
© Paige Vickers, 2013
