News articles usually require tight turnarounds. It’s not always possible to create a brand new illustration in time for the news cycle, but we have plenty of past illustrations available for license if you need something to accompany a piece.
For illustrations to accompany a feature piece, we are usually sent through an early draft or brief synopsis of the themes to be covered. We’ll then work on some concept sketches for artwork ideas that we think grasp the key concepts. At this point it’s useful to know whether it’s a main cover illustration that’s required, or multiple smaller illustrations, so that we can adjust the complexity of the concept sketches. Some clients prefer to leave this decision until they see the ideas we present though.
Once the sizes of the artworks and concept sketches have been agreed upon, we’ll work these up into pencil sketches. We’ll then forward these on to you to check if there are any edits that need to be made. Edits are much easier to make at the pencil stage than later on so it’s best to mention any now.
Once the pencil drafts are approved we’ll start inking up the illustration. We’ll then scan it into Photoshop and do a quick clean-up. At this stage we’ll check with you whether you want the illustration to be an infinitely scalable vector or to remain as a fixed size image. Vectors require the line art to be traced in illustrator, which can result in lines that look overly smoothed.
We’ll then do a first round of colouring, and check in with a first draft. At this stage it’s easy to move some of the elements around, and to change the colours, although wholesale redrawing is much harder. Once the colour choices and any further changes are approved, we’ll send over a final version to the specifications that you require.
