New Work: Editorial Illustration

This was a piece I did for an article I found in The Times, written by Giles Coren called 'You've never heard of Paddington Basin, the little sink from darkest Peru?'.

The article has a few different tangents to it, but the one I focussed on was the trouble Giles is having with his new resolution - B.O.O.M, or Back Off On Meat when eating out at restaurants, especially when having Dim Sum at a restaurant in the newly developed Paddington Basin. Hence the title of the article - the original illustration was a take on that title, with Paddington etc, but I wanted to steer away from that and do something more food related. So I just did a spread of dim sum with a nice bit of Pak Choi as the main focus - relating to what the article says about trying to order lots more vegetables.

It's not my favourite piece I've ever done, I think the colours are too pastel-y and it's just not that visually interesting. Here's it superimposed into the original article for context:


I've realised I need to do a lot more editorials for my portfolio, as that's the area I'm trying to get work in. So I've been scouring newspapers and magazines etc for interesting articles to illustrate. It helps if I get someone else to cut out the original illustration (which was actually commissioned for the article) so that I'm not influenced by it. So it's not a dig at the original illustrator, thinking that I can do better than what they did etc, it's just a lot easier if I take existing articles and create an illustration for them - it's the only thing I can do until I get real commissions to fill my portfolio.

So I'm aiming to do one or two new pieces today :)