For this editorial weekly, I chose to illustrate for this article from The New Yorker, called 'Unplanned Parenthood' - a satirical piece about the influx of religious pressure on Planned Parenthoods in the USA, which is causing hundreds of women issues in getting abortions, sexual health care and low-cost cancer screenings.
The New Yorker is a very prestigious news outlet for those in the world of Editorial Illustration - they regularly commission illustrators for their articles, which makes it a good place to get your portfolio in! The downside to this is that thousands of people send work to the New Yorker, and also the New York Times every year, and it's prestige makes it very difficult to stand out to get into it.
We had a talk from Victo Ngai - who happens to be a regular illustrator for both of these publications, who talked to us a lot about the work pace that surrounds editorial illustration. A lot of her deadlines are 1-2 days ahead at most, which in theory would make it a suitable field for me to work in, since I work much better doing work with a tight deadline than I do with long projects.
She also talked a lot about the way she works, and how her work has developed over the years. I really like Victo's work - even though i'd say it's very different from mine, but a reassuring message that I got from her talk was that a lot of her illustration is about building a perspective that is unique to her, so even if your work is 'different' - it gives potential clients more of a reason to want your work over someone else's. She also told us that getting professional feedback from clients on your portfolio was also really important (which is why she moved to New York) - so this is all stuff I need to bear in mind if I want to put together an editorial portfolio down the line!
Back to the brief though - This is the original illustration that was paired with the article, made by Gary Taxali. Gary does a lot of vintage-inspired illustration, which I like - but I think this is a bit...dull? For the article is goes with? You get the symbolism with the whole stork thing but I think there is much stronger imagery in the article that could be worked with (describing a planned parenthood as a 'hellish sin pit' conjures up a lot more than a pastel stork - for me, anyway)
Having made two approaches to this weekly challenge quite analogously (both in watercolour and gouache) - I wanted to try to explore the approach I'd used for the guardian brief again. I had a crit with Ben, who felt the guardian work had a much stronger tone of 'me' in it, and I wanted to try and capture that as much as possible.
These are the thumbs and sketches I did for this - a lot more chaos going on (which I think reflects the state of planned parenthood, and the tone of the article) I wanted to get in loads of fire and brimstone and religious symbolism - without it being 'too' much.
This was the first response I came up with. It's different from the original format of the Gary Taxali illustration - mostly because ben mentioned I should try to experiment more with the orientation and formats I was using - but I don't think this is the most successful.
I drew the lines in fineliner on cartridge - scanned, fixed them and then dropped in some colour. I wanted to try to keep on with this simple digital colour look (though I later got a lot of critisism for it in further crits) - and whilst I like this, and I like the simplicity I do think the format needs to be changed to make it more appropriate for the article.
This is the reformat version. I think it looks better in this perspective but I still don't think this is the strongest of responses. I'm trying not to spend too long on these - because I don't think its realistic to the realities of editorial illustration, but I think if I did this one again I would choose to do another thumb, as I think they were more successful than the final outcome.
Here's what it looks like in situ:
My work in the New Yorker! (I wish!)
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