Above are some initial sketches and concept ideas. the three vector images clearly werent working, these were based on the simple, communicative styles of illustrators that have done work for G2 covers in the past. I established pretty quickly that I do not work effectively using this approach, and decided to start bulding up on the idea and use more detail.
This is the basic line art that I came up with, i am happy with this and I think it is a vast improvement from the initial work which ended up leading me back to an approach I have used before, but never in the context of editorial illustration.
I added 5 colours plus tints, as I stated in a previous post, I will be printing these illutrations twice, round one will be digital print, meaning I can afford to use more colours. Round two will be hand printed, so I will strip the colour right back to 2 or 3 (including stock). Im confident adding detail was a worthwile move here. It adds a unique look to the image, making it feel slightly less like a churned out editorial image.
I started playing with layout, and began to re create a hypothetical back issue of G2, using my ilustration. I think G2 is a great portal to an instant context because the covers often have something a little less hard edge news on the cover. Of the image above, I was happy with the way the heading co existed with the G2 logo in terms of distributed space, but it made the rest of the space feel a bit bare. I began sequentially adding more sub headings, and then colour and texture to the page, to liven it up. At this stage, this was all done on illustrator, but I wanted to make sure the approach I have decided to use works in its context.
(Which i feel it does)
Just a small note: I need to get hold of a couple of typefaces that would actually be used on the cover of G2 - these were typefaces which I found as a temporary measure until next week, when I will have collated all 15 images and then begin to actually define their layout.
