Illustration 1: Key steps in illustration- Part 5: Words and pictures-Exercise 3: Travel guides
Your brief is to produce three illustrations for a series of books jackets, at the size of an existing travel guide, for the locations Istanbul, Helsinki and Milan.
The client would like you to create illustrations in which many elements are brought together in a diagrammatic way. They would also like the type to be hand-drawn in an appropriate style.
There are an infinite number of permutations available within this brief and therefore a high degree of flexibility. Write yourself a brief that is challenging but manageable. Be aware of the processes which have so far led to your development in ideas generation, visual research, image construction, understanding contexts and media usage. Use worksheets and sketchbooks to explore the problem you set yourself and refer to examples of work which solves similar types of problems.
Provide client visuals for all three covers and a mock-up for one.
I continued this process with Helsinki and Milan, collating interesting imagery and noting certain words/visual references that I felt encapsulated the cities.
I then noted some ideas for composition/layout of the travel guide itself. I decided to go with an A5 size, small enough to fit in a bag and large enough to be viewed. An important part of the illustration I feel is that it encompasses the whole guide, not just the front cover.
Once creating my individual illustrations, referring back to my thumbnails I laid out the guide cover. I wanted the cover to be one complete illustration, moving from the front round the spine to the back.
I created mock ups of each design as I felt it was more beneficial to see the finals together. I feel like they are an interesting response to the brief but am unsure of how professional the designs look or would come across to the target audience.
I wanted to create a series (the world map behind with the polaroid on top) that was a ‘singular’ illustration spreading across the guide. I added ‘travel guide: city’ to the spines of each guide including the contrast between a Gotham typeface and the hand drawn type from the polaroid.
I began this task by researching travel guides and illustrations, collating some interesting compositions/artworks to reference. I jotted some initial ideas for layouts using ‘Milan’ as the example. I then went onto researching Istanbul and created a few mood boards of images, including a spider diagram where I noted key parts or imagery that represents Istanbul.
Referring back to my mood boards for each city, I sketched 4 key elements, one building, a statue and food representative of the city/country.
I used water colours for the initial colour layer, scanning it in and re-printing then going over it in various pencils/oil pastels. I scanned and re-printed again to add texture and went over this in a black fine liner.
I aimed for a loose style trying to represent key sites of the cities.
For continuity and to bring the 3 designs together as a series I aimed to have the colours of the book the same (green and blue) with the country outline changing and the polaroid on the front.
I am unsure whether the final results of each are easily distinguishable between one another. Perhaps the green and blue background colours could match each countries flags in order to be more individual but also a part of a series.
