Hi Robert!
A few quick thoughts...
After you fully brainstorm ideas in written form via your "word tree" and have gathered inspirational reference, you can start rough sketching your visual story (illustration) for the flu editorial assignment. This is the stage where you will explore what you are trying to "say" with your illustration. Your goal is to grab the attention of the reader of this newspaper, in this case, the April edition of the "The Funny Times." You want to get them to read the story with your engaging illustration. I will post some info about editorial illustration.
Start by designing your "story." The size of the illustration is in proportion to 4x3, so your final illustration could be 8x6.
Spend today developing your character with several versions. Just do rough exploratory sketches in pencil, nothing finished. To keep it simple, you may want to limit yourself to black and white, even for the final illustration.
Some questions to ask yourself: Who/what is your character or characters? What story are you telling visually? (See some examples that I wrote on your blog) What details can you add to the character and setting to enhance your story telling in a visual way? What is it's size, personality, what is the character doing to tell your story or point of view visually?
Any questions? Ask away! You can respond under comments here, just to keep everything in one place, or you can email/call.
Am I allowed to have any text to go along with my illustration (character dialogue, for example), or should it be purely imagery?
ReplyDeleteTo make a short story long :o) In most cases, I guess I think of editorial illustrations as not having word balloons or text under the illustration, which is more like a gag cartoon, greeting card or comic strip. Although if you want to work for the New Yorker, for example, they typically use editorial cartoons with some writing to indicate that the character is talking, and treat it like a panel cartoon like what we do with greeting cards. See link here under "editorial cartoon": http://ronaldslabbers.com or greeting cards here (see link) http://www.shoeboxblog.com - look under cartoon, "all," and finally here http://www.newyorker.com/cartoons. In these cases cases, these are magazines that typically use panel cartoons. But in most cases, magazines like the New York Times or Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, for example, the editorial illustration is more "conceptual." Do a google search for "conceptual Illustration" and "Editorial Illustration" to see what I mean. You'll notice that some editorial illustrations are still humorous, but do not use words, just clever imagery to tell a story. So for this assignment, I was treating like a conceptual editorial illustration assignment where you are forced to tell a story with your imagery without the support of dialog or words. Tell you what, because you are still exploring, if you want to try the panel or comic approach because this is an area of illustration you want to pursue, do a few quick thumbnail sketch ideas as illustration with dialog, but also do a few sketches without and treat more "conceptually," as in NO dialog. The sketches can literally be 4 x 4 inches, VERY loose, just to get the idea across. At this stage it's all about communicating the idea to an art director. Post your quick thumbnail sketches and we can choose the best idea. This is what you would typically do on an actual assignment with an art director anyway. You want to give an art director a few sketches/ideas to chose from, then you create a finished illustration. If you want, for the last assignment of week 3, I can give you specifically a panel card illustration assignment, where you draw a humorous illustration AND write a gag. I will leave that up to you! (In other words, you tell me what you want to try out for the last assignment.) Good luck!
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