Editorial Illustration.

The first project of our new semester required us to create an editorial illustration for a news article, as an introduction to creating conceptual art work. I was given the article, ' Excremental Growth: UK sniffs a pandemic puppy poo problem', by The Guardian. This text centred around the idea that more people have been buying new puppies during the pandemic, and less people have been picking up after their dogs. This is therefore creating a large increase in the amount of dog poo left out in the environment.
      Before I began putting pencil to paper, I went over to Pinterest to collect together some examples of conceptual illustration. This step also really helped my understanding of what conceptual illustration was compared to literal illustration.

​ Then, to begin designing, I went through the article, and quickly got down my initial ideas as thumbnails.

In the beginning, I got quite stuck on specific lines and scenarios from the article, but as I continued I began to come up with more conceptual ideas involving recognisable iconography such as a graph. I felt that this specifically worked as graphs are associated a lot with the visuals of the virus at the moment.
     I then worked up some of the visuals with colour.

At this point, it became extremely clear that pretty much all of my earlier ideas didn't work for the illustration, so I began to really focus in on developing the graph-based thumbnails.

I was a lot happier with these visuals, however, they still weren't perfect. After speaking to Tony, I decided to make a final few thumbnails exaggerating the amount of dog poo in order to really clearly show visually that the amount of the poo has increased in the pandemic.

At this point, I knew that visually I was in the right place with my illustration, and decided to go forward with my final piece in the correct proportions for the article.

I'm so beyond happy with how this piece turned out, and I'm really glad that I kept pushing the ideas around to get to this point. The style is something very outside of my comfort zone, but I think the graphic style compliments the idea a lot. It is clear and concise in the message it is conveying. At this point, the animation was the only thing left to do. I'm also super happy with how this ended up looking.

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