Make Art That Sells Part B- Week 4

I love drawing maps!

I just finished week 4 of Lilla Rogers Make Art That Sells (Part B) online class. I’m really enjoying the course and highly recommend it if you want to develop your portfolio and learn all about how to approach different markets with your illustrations. The class isn’t about learning technical drawing skills, it’s more for tailoring your style and existing skills to something that’s marketable and you learn about what approaches and layouts work best and why. You get tons of industry insights and there are interviews with people who commission the different types of illustration jobs. I love my teacher Lilla. She is very practical and positive and the classes are paced very well with a mini-assignment at the start of the week to get you moving and then a big deadline at the end so that you’ll actually produce something.

For this week we had to draw a map of where we live. My idea was to draw a map enticing my fellow co-workers in Fumbally Exchange to skip off work and cycle to the seaside. Really enjoyed making it!

I started with my favorite thing about Dublin: been able to cycle around everywhere! I have a beautiful bicycle that my family gave me for my birthday the year before last and I always get people saying “I love your bike!” as I cycle round. It’s an electra bicycle with Alexander Girard illustrations on it. So of course, I had to start my Dublin map with a selfie of me and the bike (wearing my new dress).

alexander girard electra bicycle

my bike

me and my bike

And then I marked out all the places on the route that we’d need to pass, cycling from Fumbally (5 Dame Lane) to one of my favourite and easy to get to spots, Seapoint in Monkstown.

Ice-cream is an essential component of any seaside visit and I remembered the cool vintage ice-cream van that used to come by my house when I lived in Windy Arbour. I took a photo at the time and when I checked it I was delighted to see it had the exact same colours as my bike: blue, pink and red! The ice-cream man told me that he brought it over from Wales in the 60’s and that it was a converted bread-van. He told me how it was in loads of films set in Dubin. I found an article about him from Totally Dublin here.

Mr Ripple

Loved drawing it!

Looking forward to making more maps now.

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