Eric Fraser and Aude Van Ryn - Editorial Illustration

Of all of the subjects that I have studied during this project, this has been the one that has proved the most difficult for me. At first, I’d never really heard of this branch of illustration and so I was really unfamiliar with the techniques and practices that editorial illustrators use. One quotation that has really helped me understand this line of work is this; ‘The essence of editorial Illustration is visual commentary. Its principal function is to be symbiotic with journalism contained within the pages of newspapers and magazines’. Often these images will be used to describe a concept, an abstract thought or a sensitive subject, without being too cliché or obvious.
One Illustrator who is particularly famous for this type of work is Eric Fraser. Most famous for his work with the Radio Times, his iconic black and white illustrations were used to describe many conceptual topics such as silence, life, death and war.

Study Number One

The first image I made for this category of illustration actually didn’t make the blog. As practice I made a drawing to ‘fill in the gap’ in an article from the Guardian, the title of which was ‘Why your gullibility is a goldmine’. At first I made an illustration describing a rather fashionable young woman purchasing a ‘Gucci’ handbag from a man on the street with a shopping trolley full of ‘real designer wares’. This however was drawn in portrait orientation and after having a think about it I realised that this would never fit into the space provided for an illustration in the article layout. Instead I took inspiration from Eric Fraser’s surreal, graphical style and made this. I wanted to reference something that not many people believe in as a working product, so I cast my mind back to the ‘miracle tonic’ sellers of older times. I also think this image fits in well with Fraser’s archaic style, as much of his work was made in the earlier part of the 20^th century and so a lot of his subject matter refers to religious and old-fashioned scenes. I took a lot of inspiration from this particular image.

Study Number Two

My second study saw me emulating a different Editorial Illustrator, Aude Van Ryn. This artist was a lot more contemporary and in my opinion easier to understand thanks to her graphic, almost diagrammatic style. One technique that Van Ryn uses quite often is the use of silhouettes and basic shapes. Here I used these to loosely describe business, a subject that I feel would feature quite heavily in a newspaper, and perhaps it would need accompanying with an image. I decided to abstract the concept, breaking it down into what I feel business is; buying and selling. This is why I chose to depict a character selecting their desired product from a group of objects, which have been presented to her by another character, a small business owner perhaps?

Study Number Three

My third attempt saw me turn to silhouettes once again. This time I pared my illustration with the image of an hourglass.  Through my research I noticed that the hourglass is quite commonly used throughout editorial illustration, as this is a well known and recognisable symbol of time. Again I tried to convey visually, an abstract or sensitive subject; in this instance the concept was terminal illness. I wanted the figure to represent the illness itself, tampering with or even terminating the remaining time in the hourglass.

Study Number Four

To complete my last emulation, I once again took inspiration from Aude Van Ryn, this time using another of her techniques. I noticed that she uses a lot of toned-down blocks of colour to describe clothing, backgrounds and objects which interact with her figures. For the purpose of this exercise I decided to use a human face with a surreal twist to describe how I feel about my studies at the moment; stressed and confused. I wanted her expression to read as calm and collected, but for the spiral in her head to be almost difficult to read to represent her anxiety and nervousness. The original colours were those in the left hand image, however as I was playing around with the layer settings I noticed that putting the image into negative would actually give an colour palette  much closer to the one that Van Ryn uses to describe her figures. A comparative example of this can be found here [3]. 

References

[1] Male, 2007.
[2] Taylor, 2013.
[3] Van Ryn, 2015. 

Bibliography

Male, A. 2007. Illustration: a theoretical and contextual perspective. Lausanne, AVA Academia. . [Online] [Accessed from 2015] Available from: https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=rlJP8I1cao8C&oi=fnd&pg=PP2&dq=illustration:+a+theoretical+and+contextual+perspective.&ots=flQi81IWUW&sig=zqVNSKRrXieRubV0cVkRyQvUHU0#v=onepage&q=illustration%3A%20a%20theoretical%20and%20contextual%20perspective.&f=false

Taylor, J R. 2013. Image of ‘Silence in Heaven’. The Times. [Online] [Accessed from 2015] Available from: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00410/127121568_Fraser1_410272c.jpg

Van Ryn, A. 2015. Image of silhouette figure. Heart agency. [Online] [Accessed from 2015] Available from:  http://www.heartagency.com/store/images/3542/main/vanryn_lge_11.jpg?1392397481