I love everything about Notion. It’s such a beautiful tool to use and makes boring stuff like tracking habits and writing journals a real breeze. The consistency of notions brand also astounds me, every little detail on their website is thought out and informative while remaining extremely playful; I guess we have Notion’s Art Director,
, to thank for that.
Recently, I’ve really grown to admire Romans illustrations on Notion. The way they say so much in such a nonchalant, minimal way inspired me to try my hand at copying this style, so hopefully I can incorporate some elements into my own drawing style (which FYI I haven’t found yet!).
An example of Romans drawings on Notion.
In this article I’ll break down how I went about learning this style of drawing which was very different to anything I’d tried before, I think the steps are pretty relevant to learning any new skill.
‘What to copy is a little bit trickier. Don’t just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style. You don’t want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes.’ — Austin Kleon, Steal like an artist
Copying without understanding something about where an artists thinking is coming from, in my experience, results in a very superficial understanding of an artists techniques. I googled Romans name and found he had a few Skillshare courses. I took the course Improvised Illustration: Style and Technique. Whilst the course didn’t teach anything specific about Romans technique for his Notion cartoons, it gave me something more valuable: an insight into his thinking.
From the course I learned that Roman has a fairly impatient nature, which expresses itself in his art. Rather than building up sketches and refining his work, I got the impression Roman likes to dash out a number of quick drawings in a more instinctive way than other artists I have looked into.
Check out my Youtube video on the same topic
My goal was to copy the facial aspects of Romans illustrations — at least to begin with. If I could make a reasonable copy of one of his lovely characters I’d be content.
Once I’d picked my target I started to build my portfolio, copying every image on the Notion website that spoke to me (to be honest this was most of them).
My portfolio