Waste of May

It started with an idea for an editorial style illustration around the idea that there is now a black market in the UK for grocery items. Whilst food banks do the best they can to provide the basics that people need to survive, treats and non-essentials are not covered. Opportunists or organised, there are people shop-lifting and reselling those items at lower prices. Right or wrong, whatever your viewpoint, it’s a fact of life in the UK in 2024.

So the idea for this came from a sketch I did of a photograph I made walking around Margate Old Town. Sketching got me thinking about what happen down this dead end. From there I collaged in an old woman I photographed in Marrakesh over a decade ago and drew in a van. I now had the bare bones of what I wanted to create. I painted over the collage roughly and made up colours and textures as I went. This way of working was all inspired by a Domestika course by Citlali Haro I had just taken. As a fairly new illustrator with no background, short video courses work really well for me.

From there I printed it out in black and white, marked out a grid and drew it on an A3 sketchpad. Up to now, things are going great. In fact the drawing only took me around an hour to rough out and was really pleased with it.

So I’m working between digital and analogue processes here and now it’s back to digital again. The pencil drawing is photographed and pulled back into Procreate and then overdrawn again. This time though elements are separated - the woman is on her own separate layer from the background and that was wise decision as she did need enlarging to work better within the space. Still at this point, things are fine.

All of the above took place in beginning of May and yesterday as we come close to the end of May, I decided to stop working anymore on this illustration. Somewhere along the line, it all got a bit lost and so did I but there may be some learning for me from it.

So I’m going to share below some colour work I have done since finishing the line drawing above.

I thnk from the beginning I had in mind a clear vision of how this was to look. I am thinking cinematic, more specifically Bourne-esque cinematography. I even went back to find cinematic colour palettes that I thought would work. But what I hadn’t taken into account was that works well for cinema or television, may not work for print. Too dark and it’s difficult to read from a distance and that was the case in the image on the left hand side of the grid above. I’ve since reworked it several times but still not satisfied. I took another Domestika course with Jim Spendlove which was brilliant. As much as possible I tried to adopt his method but despite fully grasping the theory, I found this way of working not best suited to me. If you’ve taken the course, you’ll recognise I’ve not followed it to the letter and that’s why it’s not worked but I just found that I wanted a faster route to the end and he works much more diligently than me. However I would still highly recommend his course and there are loads of lessons from his process that I will adopt. But it’s more than that.

Somewhere along the line, I really ran out of love of this piece and what I was doing. It became really stressful and the more and more I reworked both the linework and the colour, the more I killed any life that this illustration ever had. It all became very mechanical and drawn out.

My happiest and most rewarding work is made with more spontaneity. Somehow looser, more spur of the moment. This could not be further from this piece that I have worked on and thought about almost constantly for approaching 3 weeks. I don’t want to work like this nor, more importantly, do I want to feel like this when I’m making. This is supposed to be fun.

As I realised this, I remember when I started collaging as my intro to illustration and it was the immediate satisfaction and reward that I enjoyed. Not protracted labour. I never signed up for this. Somewhere along the line, it all got a bit lost as I tried to constantly improve.

So three weeks of work, nagging doubt and stress and all I have from it is a lesson. But an important one. Who know’s at some point I may revisit this but for now, it’s going into a file called ‘Stalled’ with several others that have suffered the same fate/

So back to my sketchbook that I’ve also largely ignored, try to loosen up and find a way to work more aligned to me that trying to wear someone else’s coat. Nothing is ever wasted but do feel like I could, or should, have come to this conclusion much earlier.