Vice Editorial Illustrations
The Challenge
This project is about designing 3 editorial illustrations for VICE Media News that shows on the phone app.
I think the main challenge encountered when designing conceptual illustrations is how to correctly display the content conveyed in the article and the pictures must also be interesting to attract young people's attention.
How to show that the birds are cleaned up? How to express the real fear behind the witch trial, and how to emphasize the unknown behind this? How to show people's attitudes towards aliens?
Three Articles
A New Exhibition Gets at the Truth Behind the Salem Witch Trials. In Some Ways, It’s Scarier Than the Lore.
Cleansed of oil, birds harmed by O.C. spill take flight in Huntington Beach
Most Americans think intelligent aliens exist, and half think they have visited Earth
Early Concept
In the early concept, I provided three versions of the style.
Simple & Graphic
The simple painting style is accompanied by strong contrasting colors. The style is close to the silhouette painting, and the outline of the outline is not required. All of the design is make the look simple and graphic, also easy to understand.
Illustraition & Drama
This direction will be designed to be very dramatic, to attract people’s attention, and to guess what is happening.
The coloring style of the old manga matches the slightly messy lines, and the contour lines in this style will be more vivid and full of details of the picture.
Use brighter, high-conformity colors.
Stylized
This direction is to attract people’s attention with a strong individual painting style and weird design concept.
With some paper-cut collage style, it is more inclined to the style of children’s picture book illustrations. The messy lines are combined together to piece together the shape of the object, adding the use of darker colors.
More Concept Sketches
When I was drawing these drafts, I tried to add different lens language expressions to present the content of the article. I also thought about color matching for a long time, how to increase the contrast of the picture but control it in a style.
Final Style
After feedback, I improved it, and finally determined the final style that is more suitable for the project.
The final style has the following characteristics.
The key figures or objects on the screen will be outlined by white edge lines. Use of high-saturation colors.
The use of miscellaneous line material and picture noise texture. The main characters or objects drawn with white lines do not need to be painted with random line material effects.
Second Pass Sketches
After a meeting with the director. The current screen design is more appropriate to the title and content of the article. The composition of the picture has also been unified, all of which are in the center composition. We can see from the pictures that the witches and the truth behind the witches that people have seen can be clearly expressed. The birds were cleaned by people in the polluted sea. People will not be surprised or disbelief because of the arrival of aliens.
Third Pass Sketches
At this stage, I think the biggest challenge is how to make the subject of the picture more prominent and not be disturbed by the background and other elements. Leave blanks where necessary, add details where appropriate, and how to control the style of painting. The question here is whether the aliens are too conspicuous in the entire illustration to correspond to the plot of the article. The distance between the released bird and the person is too close to make the main character unclear and easy to produce misleading information that makes people think that it is a person catching a bird. It was not that they were released, the appearance of the witch at the exhibition was too immature.
Final Frames
Loop Animation
