Final Major Project – Development of cartoons

For the illustrations, I initially started out with sketches and quick drawings to visualise each article. And determine ways I could show the article through the illustration. This however is quite a difficult task to tell a story through an illustration. But along the way I realised that the importance dosn’t need to be upon telling the story, the illustration just needs to be an extension of the title. They will become a way of visualising the ‘facts’ and possibly adding a little humour along the way. Each article will have it’s own page that is introduced by a catching title, or maybe even the article’s title itself, and then the illustration becomes an extension of that.

As i have mentioned, I have started out with sketches for each article, from there I scanned in the images to trace in illustrator and create vectors. Now vectors always have the same look and feel, which is why here I have experimented with colour and possibly different styles of line weight. I downloaded a few different styles of brush for the illustrations and experimented with the idea of a more hand drawn line effect where the line becomes thicker in places.

At this point I’m unsure as to whether to continue with the cartoon effect I seem to be creating, because of the message I’m trying to impose through the booklet. Creating a hand drawn feel to the booklet will allow for cartoon styled illustrations to work, however I may possibly opt for a more professional feel and stick with basic line weight, that’s thin and is as it was when I originally pen tooled the image. It depends on when I start to build the compositions. Having all these illustrations digital now will allow for easy changes to be made if I am unsure of the style thats developing through the book compositions.

The first image here is of my quick sketches and the second is my experimentation with which illustration to choose.