Editorial illustration is one of the
first commissions an illustrator will take on. More often than not,
particular illustrators will be commissioned to do a piece for a
magazine, newspaper, etc, because they carry a certain style that
would best suit the content of the article.
The key to creating a successful
editorial accompaniment is to utilize the main visual components of
the article, but do so in such a way that it fits the house style of
the publication.
I'm going to be taking a look at 4
different editorial pieces by 4 different illustrators, and compare
their visual positives, and how effective they are in their chosen
publications.
The first one I'm going to be looking
at is this one, by Chinese illustrator Shan Jiang, for Wired
Magazine (US and UK).
Based in Shanghai and the UK, Shan
Jiang currently works for I Love Dust UK design agency, and carries a
very distinctive look throughout his work, which seems to mainly
consist of detailed ink-drawn vignettes and elements later worked up
digitally. Jiang seems to be rather fond of using texture overlays in
his work, something I personally have started to do, although
admittedly not as subtle as Jiang's.
The above piece, for Wired Magazine,
was commissioned for the “Cheat with Science” section of the
magazine. This one, in particular, named “Navigate the Great
Indoors”, gives advice to those reliant on GPS on how to find their
way through large buildings. I am not even joking. There is a whole
article dedicated to this.
You can see how Jiang has used the
familiar location icon used in services like Google Maps, etc. Jiang
has also done well to keep the colour range to a minimum, with warm
orange tones in contrast to the blue sky. The blooming effect,
especially on the buildings, breaks up what would have been a very
technical, cumbersome illustration. The remaining detail on the
buildings is wonderful, very uniform. It is also worth taking note of
the decline in definition of said buildings, the further back the
image reaches.
Now this illustration communicates the
message of the article rather well, if not in a very surreal way.
Whilst here, Jiang uses a decent amount of strong lines and overall,
seems quite illustrative, Christian Montenegro's work retains a more
digital outcome, with images comprised of simple shapes, such as this
one.
Montenegro, an Argentinean illustrator
and designer, produced this piece for New Scientist, for a feature
about the nature of neutrinos; “Keys to the Universe”. Right from
the first glance, you can see that Montenegro's work is a lot more
graphic design based, and uses geometric shapes to piece together his
images. Something Montenegro shares with Jiang, is the use of
textures, although whilst Jiang appears to digitally overlay his
work, Montenegro's method looks more traditional, and more like a
rough screen printing technique has been employed to get this effect.
In various areas, you can even see what appears to look like brush
strokes. Possible stencil use? Or is it yet another texture overlay
in Photoshop? In any case, it looks a lot more convincing than
Jiang's, which I can only assume is there to break up large areas of
similar colour, to make it look less harsh.
The colour scheme in this, along with a
vast majority of Montenegro's work, is very limited, unless a
variation is required. You can see here, two examples of the same
commission, the left hand side one being the front cover of that
particular issue, and the right being an accompaniment to the article
inside, which shows uniform lines of geometric key shapes. The one on
the right, due to the size of the elements being reduced vastly,
makes it a lot less evident that only red, blue and yellow were used.
This can be compared to Jiang's work again, in the way that in that
particular piece, Jiang only really used two main colours; orange and
blue, but is different in the way that Jiang blended the two together
more traditionally, whereas Montenegro overlaid colours to achieve
greens, oranges, etc.
Staying with graphic design slightly, I
would like to take a look at Nishant Choksi, a UK-based illustrator
and designer, who has a distinctive, kitsch, almost 1940s-50s
Americana feel to it.
Here is a piece Choksi made for The New
Yorker, for their article, “Magic Mountain”, on the World
Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Choksi's work can differ from a
cleaner, tidier feel similar to Montenegro's work, or it can be
comprised of very loose line work, like this piece above. Again, the
colour range is very limited, which was a wise choice; I imagine too
much colour would have overpowered this piece, which in essence,
doesn't even need colour to be effective, as it gets across the
message perfectly.
The illustration itself is very basic;
simplified characters, a staple of Choksi's work, and jagged, angular
mountains, with crudely added shading with what appears to be the
work of a brush. So what we have here is an interesting effect in
which the unkempt outline of these shapes goes so far as to look
intentional from a certain standpoint, as if Choksi wanted it to look
EXACTLY like this. Looking at the piece, I can see why cleaning up
the edges of the shaded sections, and anywhere else on the piece for
that matter, would have been a folly on Choksi's behalf, as it would
have not had as much character, not as much animation as the main
congregation.
If I'm to compare Choksi's work to that
of Jiang and Montnegro, I'd say Choksi could be seen as the mid-way
point between the two, one being very illustrative, and the other
being very design-based; Choksi's work lies somewhere in between, the
best of both worlds, in a sense.
For a publication like the New Yorker,
I feel Choksi's work retains the subtlety and simplicity most other
editorial pieces in the paper would. The best comparison I could make
is the Guardian newspaper in the UK, in which the editorial pieces
rarely go all out, like this next one.
Marcos Chin, an illustrator based in
New York, takes a lot of influence from Asian art, one such example
of this is this piece that was commissioned by Car and Driver
magazine (US), named “The Lightening Lap”. You can see Chin has
used various elements from what seems to be Japanese mythology
(although it does seem there are some Chinese influences in here
too...). Unlike the others, this is bursting with colour; a vibrant
display of pinks, oranges, greens, blues, etc. The line work varies
in tone too, from black, to dark maroons, to pink, even white. This
is something I personally should be paying attention to, as I usually
don't take the hue of line into account.
The elements are the product of the
dust being kicked up by the screeching wheel of the sports car, a
supposed visual metaphor of something wild, something free. This is a
very animated piece, filled with lots of different kinds of
illustration; whether highly detailed and coloured mythological
creatures, or just line-art of simple dust clouds. In all of this,
the visible back end of the car is almost lost entirely, save for a
bold black wheel.
In comparison to the three other
pieces, this is probably the most different, because it tries ideas
the others didn't, like a wide colour range and purposely chaotic
composition. Speaking of composition, I would go as far as to say
this piece sort of complies with the old ukiyo-e wood block prints,
which span from the 17th to 20th centuries. One
of ukiyo-e's main characteristics was composition; at the time, the
western world of artists would have never attempted to use up as much
space as the ukiyo-e artists did, and despite not being put into
practice here, carrying an illustration out of the frame and then
back again was unheard of in the western world.
I imagine this editorial would have
suited the article very well, going by the title and all. As long as
the magazine isn't something fairly plain and frugal like most
motoring magazines over this side of the Atlantic, I don't think it
would look out of place at all.
So there we have it. Four different
editorial illustrations, which share similarities, but are also quite
different, yet equally effective for their causes. It just goes to
show editorial illustration is just as diverse as any other field in
art and design, and after all, these publications sought after these
particular artists from the off.
