For this week's Editorial weekly brief, I picked an article from the BBC's News website - this time about about the ethics behind what can and can not be considered free speech, and on what grounds 'offence' can be used to prevent somebody having a platform to express their opinion.
I dont necessarily agree with the viewpoints expressed in the article, but the concepts surrounding the elements of 'free speech' seemed really interesting, and I thought it would be a cool challenge to try and illustrate something that I partially disagreed with.
I really enjoyed working with the watercolour for the previous weeks editorial illustration, so I decided to use some more analogous media again this week in the form of gouache - which I haven't really done before
I tried a lot of different approaches with the composition - but I thought all of them were really complex and would have taken a while to do in gouache. In the end I went with the bold, cropped closeup of the face - with the tongue being chopped off, since I thought it was the best visual out my thumbs that communicated the theme of free speech. If you saw it aside an article, I think it would communicate it to you a lot quicker than the other thumb's I'd drafted.
The image was originally painted using blue gouache - but upon scanning it, I wasn't keen on the quality of the background (too textural and too messy), and it lost a lot of it's visual quality in the scanning process. So, I decided to change it and alter the colour using photoshop - I also smoothed out the background considerably, to make it look a lot my refined and professional.
I think i'm really beginning to get the hang of working analogously and refining the images digitally, which is helping me open back up to the world of analogous media after working heavily using a mac for a while. I'm hoping this will carry on as my briefs progress!
Whilst I'm pleased with the overall visual quality of this outcome - its bold, it's clean and it would catch your eye if it was put next to an article, I do also feel that it is a little bit dull. I think there could have been more visually interesting ways to approach the brief, maybe with a different colour palette? This is all hindsight though.
If I had more time I might have taken a different approach to it's crafting (I wasn't hugely keen on gouache) but I'm trying to complete these in the time frame that would typically be given to illustrators to complete a quick editorial illustration (I.E - usually a day or so) - I didn't. I feel maybe down the line I need to experiment more with the gouache and see what else I can do with it.
This is what it looks like mocked up on the BBC site. I guess it looks like it fits? I think if the illustration was bolder (flat, no black lines?) it'd fit better. I think as well, it'd be more fitting to find another BBC article that has already used previous illustration (more diagrammatic illustration) as I think it'd fit it much better.
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