Life and Letters: INHALE. EXHALE. ANALYZE.
I had the opportunity to work on another illustration for the Life and Letters magazine. Below are parts of my process for how I came up with the illustration and the end product. Many images for inspiration and reference for color palettes come from the NY Times Opinion art on Instagram that I follow. The exception is the image on the right in the first row which is done by the artist Molly Mendoza. My idea for the composition was based around the mountains and objects floating in space that represent types of media to get news. The person directing me wanted the imagery to focus primarily on text and newsprint so I implemented typography and news spreads in the floating shapes.
Here are some of the first sketches I came up with for how the message of the article can best be conveyed. Two of the sketches are very different from the idea of mountains and floating objects as they were some of the first brainstorms. The rest of the sketches are refinements of the compositional layout for the idea we agreed upon. Some ideas that were brought up to consider was what the person would be doing on the side of the mountain. We did not want imagery of a person hiking or be obviously meditating in the landscape. The image should be of someone who is contemplating and analyzing in a meditative manner.
Here is the two color palettes I created for the client so they could decide what they wanted the overall look of the image to be. They decided upon the top one with more blue-green ranges and fewer pinks and yellows. The hope was using cool colors well help convey an overall mood of calmness compared to warmer colors of the second palette. From these options I would adjust the values of these colors to get more range in the illustration.
I am very pleased with the final product and I think the people who asked me to work on it were very happy with how it turned out. It is now published on the site and is displayed as the first image on the homepage, and the image after is my work from the Stress Tips article as well. Having the opportunity to work on illustrations that allow me to be more involved in the creative process as well as getting my work published is something that I find most rewarding about working here in the office. Hopefully in the future I can keep working on building a portfolio here through these projects.
