Editorial illustrations

This brief was about image making. There was four different briefs to chose from and as I have never chose to do editorial illustrations before I decided that I would give it ago.  Not wanting to be an illustrator, I found this brief quite challenging for my skills.  I learnt that illustration is about story telling and you can use anything to create the narrative behind the design.  We was given a few different texts to illustrate and after reading them all i decided that the one about x-ray specs would be very fun to illustrate.  

Week 1 

I started by doodling alot of ideas down on paper, after pictionary day in the studio. I used pencil and pen to create fast ideas.  I then used different materials such as paint, inks, etc to come up with ideas for x ray goggles.  After doing some research I found some inferred images that had black backgrounds and vibrant colours of pink, green, blue, red, yellow and orange and I wanted to create images that look like this.  I had ideas of x-ray machines Skulls, radio waves/tower and eyes.  I did alot of experiments and scanned them in and manipulated them.

Week 2 

I then thought of the magazine I would be pitching for and that was the New Scientist magazine.  I wanted to create radio waves so using pen and paint I created a few swirling movements and scanned them in and added different colour of brush layers on photoshop.  I did the goggles in the same way as for the front cover I wanted the goggles to be in the middle and the radio waves at the side.  Inside I wanted the goggles to be as though the reader is wearing them and the text would be in the googles.  I found some skiing mask goggles that would look good drawn so I used them.

Week 3 

After the tutorial last week, my drawings had to be more hand crafted.  So for the radio waves I decided that moving a torch in a black room whilst taking images of it on a slow shutter speed would produce lines and make glowing movements that could act like radio waves.  I placed them into photoshop and overlapped them to create radio waves.  I was pleased with the final outcome of the radio waves.  Inside i decided to draw an eye leading to radio waves to the goggles to more radio waves and a radio tower.  This would go straight across the double page spread meaning the goggles would be in half across the page and so big enough to fill the writing inside them.  The goggles where produced in the same way and i kept the colour scheme of the inferred images over the goggles.  Overall I am slightly pleased with the performance of my illustrations however I feel I need more ideas to make the most out of this brief.  After this brief i felt illustration is my weakest element for my career.