As part of doing illustrator research, I came across this lady called Lynne Chapman - who is a Children book illustrator. Before she got work in children's books, most of her work was in editorial illustration - and whilst she did do stuff for people like The Sunday Times, most of it was for more obscure magazines and publications for special interests (stuff like 'medical weekly' and 'your garden').
I think when most of us think of editorial - its always in the context of big name newspapers and magazines, but the special interest publications can be quite a lucrative source of editorial jobs as well, if you find ones who are open to hiring illustrators.
Knowing this - I started to think about alternative publications outside of the normal news outlets I was looking at. I found this article, written for The Stylist - a free women's lifestyle magazine, that I know often uses illustration in their articles. The article was about deal breakers and turn-offs that women usually encounter on first dates with people, which I thought was pretty funny.
I was still quite enjoying the 'Guardian' approach to image making i'd now developed - but I wanted to try to see if could re-create this purely digitally, as a means to experiment more with the digital brushes that I have. Here are the thumbs I did for it:
I tried a couple of approaches and different compositions - I like the conceptual one with the rose (in hindsight I think that would probably be the one that i'd choose to go with if I re-did it) - but I really liked the really annoyed looking woman i'd drawn, and I wanted to try and refine it!
This is an oval ink brush - taken out of Domareen Fox's brush set. It's a really nice replica ink tool - I like the textured lines that I get out of using it, and it looks very similar to the fine-liner inks i've used previously too.
This is what the outcome looks like. I kind of wanted to use the colour selectively - using it as spots to communicate hierarchy in the image and use it as a narrative tool as opposed to something just to make it look pretty. I like the red for the lady, but i'd probably rethink the muck green and beige I used in the back (ew).
I think whilst I look at this knowing theres things that I would change (compositionally i think another thumb would have worked better) I actually like this! I didn't like the inked lines at the time but I actually like the way they look now. Since having the opportunity to play more with digital brushes - I still really like Domareen's brush set for adding textured lines to stuff, and it still holds up against people like Kyle T Webster's brushes (who i've since started using in duality with Domareen's)
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