Exercise 2 - Getting the Gist

The brief was to pick an editorial – then highlight the key words which convey the article.

I flicked through some magazines and narrowed it down to two. I’d like to try the other at a later stage. The one I decided on was from a Sainsburys magazine article with the columnist making the point that she’d prefer to forsake doing DIY / updates on the house and go on summer holiday. I highlighted the key words in red.

I developed a number of ideas in my sketch book as very rough thumbnails.

Ideas and thoughts on each included :

Image of house showing decay with family heading off on holiday – could be very busy illustration – how to get all that across in a sketch – would it be suitable for small one page editorial

Images of holiday items – passport, luggage, hat, sunglasses etc – how to connect items

Image of woman all decked out in holiday clothes

House keys

At this stage I must admit I can have ideas but I find it difficult to think of what style of illustration to adopt – more abstract ? or attempt some graphics?

After far too much thinking as usual, I found an image of a Volkswagen car which I sketched. I then added some colour, the impression of characters in the backseat and some holiday style luggage on the roof etc. I’m not entirely sure how successful the sketch was although it is clear what the image is of. I really doubted my drawing abilities and if anything I know I really want to try develop/ learn more about the accuracies of how to do a good illustration based on life. However, I realise its not always important for the image to be technically accurate with correct proportions etc so I left it there for now.

combining sketched images in photoshop

I also did some rough sketches of a woman kitted out with holiday gear / in holiday attire. Again, I debated how detailed the drawings should be but ended up doing a sort of fashion like sketch. These were a bit more successful and I later added some colour with watercolours and then highlighted areas with black fineliner.

I also did some sketches of holiday items and had the idea to draw a house key with the house being the keyring.

I really want to explore what I can achieve with my illustrations by digital alterations and have done some experimentation with this in the past. However, I only have Photoshop elements at the moment but intend to purchase the full creative suite in the next few months.

original sketchbook image

I played about taking out and adding backgrounds and combined the lady image with the car in the background – experimenting with gradients as backgrounds.

I also combined some of the holiday objects and keys to try make a suitable composition.

At the moment I’m really looking at illustration everywhere and came across a magazine editorial by Kavel Rafferty which had some sketchy images which looked as if they had been created using some Photoshop filters.

I went back to my lady/ car image and added a polarisation filter and quite liked the effect. There’s quite a lot of colour in the image and a more restricted colour palate might refine the image slightly.

I’m very aware I could spend a lot longer developing this and considering alternatives but for now I think that either one of these images would work reasonable well for the editorial.

Article with image inserted

Learning points

-          I want to work on my drawing techniques and develop a range of different styles – trying loosening up my work.

-          I need to make decisions and explore the options rather than having too many ideas

-          I want to explore the effects that can be created with photoshop/ digital alterations

-          I need to work on drawing things which aren’t in front of me and work on composition of my ideas into final pieces

-          I want to look at and experiment with different colour ways/ palettes rather than just pick colours at random.