3rd Year Project: Editorial Illustration

Not posted about my uni work in a while so I thought I'd share my current project..


At the moment I'm working on my negotiated project, exploring editorial illustration. For this project I chose to look at three issue based articles that I feel strongly about; environmental issues, optimistic art, and consumerism.

At this stage, I have chosen three previously published articles from The Guardian which I am working on illustrations for:

* The first is an article about the BP oil spill in the gulf of Mexico, and it's damage to surrounding wildlife: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/jun/13/bp-spill-animals-cruelty-gulf

* The second is an article about the benefits of using art therapy in schools: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2007/nov/13/schools.uk3

* The third is an article about the recent UK riots and questions the psychology behind the looting: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/09/uk-riots-psychology-of-looting


My main aim in this project is to show that I can apply my own visual style to editorial context. I want the final outcomes to have the same style even though they are written in very different tones of voice. This will be done through choice of media.

Anyway, I am currently developing my idea for the environmental article...

The article talks about the effects the BP oil spill had on wildlife, and the main point is to tell people how they can help make a stand against the cruelty by changing attitudes as consumers. One of the ways recommended by the U.N. was to "go vegan for a month"

So this is the initial idea I had for "go vegan" and some of the development:

The initial idea is a plate of fish and chips..the fish is dead and oil-drenched..and there is a bottle of "BP Sauce" on the side..

I'm really happy with this idea as it is quite humorous as well as stating the point of the article. I'm thinking of experimenting more with collage for this project for a few reasons; I think collaging photographs of my 3D sculpture and using lots of found materials will look really good and perhaps a bit different in the context of a newspaper article, and also with editorial illustration, you are often required to produce an illustration in a very short amount of time and this is a really quick way of working.

The first part of my development has been the sauce bottle. I knew straight away this will have to b photoshopped and I am very confident in doing this. Here was my first attempt at transforming the product:

As you can see I've altered the logo and replaced the parliament image with a map of the gulf of mexico, however I'm going to experiment a bit more with using different images instead of this to see what works better. I'm also going to try using different colours instead of the blue background. This is just a rough experiment - for the final illustration I will most probably use my own photograph of the product as I'll be able to get the right angle in relation to the rest of the objects..

Anyway that's as far as I've got! More updates soon :)