We preach some heavy zen here at iStock about letting go. Abandon the self and become an element of the design. Forgo the ego and dissolve into usefulness. You could sit cross-legged under a waterfall for six months and not achieve the nothingness a stock artist strives for. Think about what the designer needs. Be an element.

Of course, as with all good advice, you can't follow it all the time. Imagine a world that followed stock iconoclasm to its extremes, where every image rolled off a white backdrop and well-timed strobe bath. A collection of rootless characters and objects floating in space. All these isolated whatsits are a valuable part of a library, but great compositions have backgrounds.

Illustrators of the world, you have nothing to lose but your chains. It's time to liberate yourselves from that clipart straight jacket. It's time to draw, and keep on drawing, even when the subject is done. Don't settle for a single character alone on a page - give them someplace to live.

Forget those elements and icons whose natural habitat is an empty white field. We're talking about illustrations; those cartoon extras and household props, skylines and set pieces. Are they floating for a good reason, or are you bogged down with two decades of clip-art baggage? Chairs need floors, utensils need drawers, and rodeo clowns need, uh, rodeo rings. So we've brought together some quick tips on following through with your illustrations.

Photographers create pristine isolations as a carrot for graphic designers. Nobody wants to spend hours at five hundred times zoom wrangling pen tool handles around a model with a cheap perm. A seamless background and some lighting savvy makes hours of work dissolve (which designers are going to bill for anyway, but that's not our issue). Isolated photographs are a solid public service, not to mention a license to print money.

But illustrations are a whole other matter. The most complicated of backgrounds are a few lazy mouse motions away from vanishing, cleanly and easily. Elements are as rootless and pluckable as you care to make them, no matter how buried in backdrop they find themselves. It's the background, not the empty space, that sells an illustration.

Don't be afraid to follow a narrative through to the end. Not every image is heading for a future as a piece of another image. People do want to download complete scenes, and illustrations have the potential to tell remarkable stories. The background isn't just the setting for the action: it's the context, the tension, the foreshadowing, and the punchline. You've created a character - now give them a world to have a relationship with, a past and a future to go with their present. Designers need tropical islands for their swimsuit models, nightclubs for their hipsters, and moonbases for their venusians. A fully realized illustration is a powerful conceptual engine, and it's the background that gives it the juice.

A few well placed lines are sometimes all you need to turn an object into a situation. The key is making them the right lines. A single horizon line can unify an image and give it direction, if it fits the composition. Think about what you're representing and try to evoke it simply, like the wrestling ring in creative_ape's Lipstick Dynamite 2 here - just a few shapes create tension and a concrete place.

As Saturday morning cartoon fans know, lines add motion and get characters from place to place, and give the artist some control over how the viewer gets through the image (more on that in a second). Cheifru's Red Chair looks simple, but those few elements - the strong angle, the analogous colors - make it moody and striking. Stay focused and avoid abstract splotches or rootless shapes - they can detract from an image's unique quality and turn into jazzed-up blank space that doesn't add anything to the overall effect.

It's not that we don't love silhouettes - it's just that we've seen a few over the years. We understand the lure of creating them, and done well they convey compact, direct messages with a clean elegance. But there's no reason that they need to float. Giving silhouette characters a home can have some remarkable results, from simple colour backgrounds to evoke a feeling, to elaborate, multi-toned backdrops. Don't settle for a simple trace when you could have an original composition.

The path your eye takes as it moves through a composition has everything to do with what you think and how you feel about the image. Fortunately, eyes are impressionable and easy to lead around. Arranging the elements of your composition to create visual direction will bring the illustration to life in a way that a single object on a page just can't. Think back to those art school lectures: cirlces and triangles superimposed over Renaissance paintings, diagrams of the Golden Mean (not just for photographers and conspiracy theorists anymore!) and tons of arrows everywhere. For those in need of a refresher, we found some great material - check out the links at the bottom of the article.

Remember, the best part of illustrating is doing whatever the hell you want. We're not teaching photorealism here - we want drawings that look good. So once you've practiced with the beginnings, forget simple and go for broke. Make complicated backgrounds that fit the effect you want. The world your illustration lives in is as flexible as you care to make it. Perspective, plane, balance - they're all available to play with in order to achieve your goal, which is a one-of-a-kind, striking image.

Image Credits

Character Collection 1 by Bryan Malley
Soccer Goal Elation by Frank Ramspott
Lipstick Dynamite 2 by Chey Espejo
Red Chair by Bryce Kroll
Rain by Zoran Milic
Vector Horizons 2 - Travel by Chris Lawrence
Dream Canoe by Brandon Laufenberg
girl from the island by Fanelie Rosier
Snatcher by Dar Yang Yan

Other Resources
www.justkiss.com
www.goshen.edu/art/ed
www.makart.com/resources/artclass
www.goshen.edu/art/ed/Compose
dummies on drawing
online drawing school