ONE DAY EDITORIAL

For the one day editorial task I chose the headline above, an article about how white flies have infested the mulberry trees of Iran's capital city, Tehran. I read through the article and picked key ideas that I thought related to the headline and were also visually interesting. The story mentioned the yellow tape that has been wrapped around the trees in the city, so I wanted this to be a key point in my illustration. 

Instead of a mind map I just started sketching ideas outside of thumbnails, just quickly to get down initial ideas that I had. As my summer work featured use of negative space, I thought I could incorporate this into the illustration, using a black leaf with the whiteflies highlighted against it. To incorporate the idea of the yellow tape,  I also added yellow arms/hands circling the leave. I also thought about someone with their head in a cloud of flies (mentioned in the article) somebody wrapped up in the fly paper (taken from the title) and one large whitefly filling the space of a silhouette of a mulberry tree.

Below I narrowed these ideas into thumbnails,  using the negative space ideas, the person wrapped in paper and also a new idea of recreating Iranian tiles to show the flies and the leaves, almost as an abstract pattern/idea. I also noticed that the big fly on the tree was a heart shape, so made it into a broken heart to show the city's distress at it's pest problem.

After showing these to George she narrowed it down to the two most successful ideas: the large fly on the tree and the Iranian tiles. She also drew up a rough of adding background and more trees to the first idea, to give it more depth and make it more interesting.

I went away and created two more detailed thumbnails, adding background and trees to the first and trying to work out the tile image!

I ended up thinking it would be quicker to do the tile illustration digitally rather than hand paint tiny squares, so I only half finished the painted tile thumbnail- the idea was to use yellow to represent the fly paper, green for the leave then leave the white bits to show the flies.

This was my initial tile design but you cannot tell what's happening, I think this idea is a good one but is executed poorly by me! If I was better at getting my head around tile art or 8 bit art then I think it would have worked out better, and I would have preferred to hand paint it as that is what medium I usually work in.

I decided to focus on the other image to take to a final illustration, so I painted it up and scanned it in.

I wanted to edit the image to make the watercolours seem less washed out, and to also just touch up the image in general.  I also thought the lower background looked quite bare, so I scanned in some painted mark making- some grass and leafy bits and also some large watercolour strokes to put into the background.

This is my image edited and I think the colours are a lot more vivid whilst also keeping the painted quality that I wanted. I also edited the watercolour marks to yellow to emphasis the yellow fly paper around the city.

In the end I just darkened the tree because I thought it looked a little patchy, I also took the other illustration and added detail to make the flies look more like actual flies and repeated the pattern to look like tiles.

When it came to printing my chosen illustration, I did have to go back and edit some parts slightly. I was aware that I wanted it to have a hand-painted effect without being too washed out, so I selected certain parts to either make it darker (like the roots on the trees in the background) or brighter ( I had to up the levels on the main fly to make it whiter, and I also brightened the yellow on the trees.

Feedback for my work was positive, somebody commented on the 'hand-painted feel' which is what I wanted for the piece,and someone also commented on the negative space effect of the insects. The only thing I'm not quite happy with is the pale yellow in the background below the trees- I think it looks quite dull printed and actually looking back it now looks quite dull on screen too compared to the rest of the image. In this respect I think I could have experimented more with the background for the image, but I am still pleased as it was my intention for the trees to be the focal point of the image.