Editorial Brief Process

After my discussion with Eva and Sophia on Monday, I have decided to move forward with my 'Pack Mentality' concept. I think that this theme has the most potential for editorial illustration, for communicating a serious issue.

I worked further in my sketchbook to understand the facial expressions of dogs, making them seem more aggressive and less cute. I collected more visual references to develop my drawings from.

SKETCHBOOK IMAGES

I revisted my roughs and altered the composition of the dogs so that they appeared to be moving in the way I intended them to. I had the most issues with the square composition, trying to work out how many dogs to include in this frame and how to position them so that the shot wasn't too crowded.

SKETCHBOOK IMAGES

I saw Bronte working in the studio with tracing paper. I've not really used tracing paper much before, and Bronte's process of layering over her subjects until she found a composition in which they all worked together was something I'd never seen before. She had a very strategic process and I decided to have a go at building my illustrations in that way.

 SKETCHBOOK IMAGES

I found that this tracing paper technique really helped me to understand the format as a scene. From that point, I used this process to develop my final illustrations. It allowed me to transfer previous successful dogs and remove those I wasn't so please with, redrawing them at a different angle or with a slightly different expression.

 

After drawing out these final roughs, I scanned them into Photoshop. I really enjoyed the Photoshop session this week and I thought that using Photoshop would be a quick and simple way to add colours and textures to my illustrations without ruining the originals. I ideally wanted to revisit the originals with traditional media once I had found a colour solution that worked with the set of illustrations in my digital experiments.

 

The brief restricted me to using just three colours. I really struggled to find a selection of colours that successfully reflected the tone of my article. I had never used just three colours before, so I had to keep reminding myself that I couldn't involve all the visual information that I would usually do with colour.

I liked how using a restricted colour palette made my illustrations consistent as a series of illustrations. Although I wanted to include a dark, forboding atmosphere, I found that using the colour grey was very bland and using black took away the opportunity to work with colours that could imbue connotations to the illustrations.

I struggled to understand how many colours I was including. Do tones count as more than one colour? I worried that I wasn't following the brief.

Simplifying the file to precisely three colours in the shot above. 

I think it needs white! White would bring out the details of the eyes and teeth, the weapons of these beasts. It would be printed on white stock, so I need to replace one of these colours.

I don't like the purple, it's too happy! A darker, moodier blue is needed.