Drawing With Silhouettes

Playing with silhouettes mixed with doodling in Clip Studio Paint

Silhouettes are so fun to use to block in an image quickly.

I learned this from Krishna Sadasivam years ago. It's such a powerful yet approachable technique to explore ideas, composition, character legibility.

All it takes is to work with blocks of solid color as shapes. Many drawing apps have a path to make that happen. Selection tools, vector drawing, bitmap drawing all provide paths to a fillable shape outline.

Big robot silhouette sketch in Inkpad

My traditional favorite is an iOS app called Inkpad. You can set your stylus to the tablet, draw a shape, lift the stylus and it's instantly filled with color. Making silhouettes with interesting topography is an additive process of draw an outline, lift the pen, repeat.

Clip Studio Paint is becoming my new favorite. It takes more steps than Inkpad, yet the quality of the lines is more subtle. The process of filling in the shapes is still fairly fast. I'm practicing with ways of quickly filling I learned recently from Jerzy Drozd in a mini workshop he presented about fast color flatting.

Silhouettes are another way I like to do wind down drawing too. I recommend giving it a try. Make some blocks of color, add little greebles, play and see what visuals emerge.