I feel that before completing this brief I already knew what editorial was and where it sits within the industry. However, I did find looking into the recent editorial illustration trends really interesting and most of them were things that I had already picked up on subconsciously. The rise of social media, particularly instagram and its effect on the illustrator was something that cropped up a lot. This idea of the illustrator as a creative entrepreneur with the power to shape and share their own work was something I found particularly interesting as I begin to think about crafting my own instagram account. I also found the rise of animation within illustration and the crossing of industries interesting as these are skills I am working on bringing into my own practice.
It was also interesting to see how different the selection of illustrators that everyone come up with was and it made for a dynamic mix in our presentation. One that I discovered that I had never heard of before was Brian Rea. I love his use of empty space, a limited colour palette and the all round simplicity of his images. I feel like I could learn something from him moving forward as these are all things I want to bring into my own image making. It was also interesting to see how the different illustrators reflected the recent trends in their work.
However, as a group we struggled to spread the workload across the team. This was because no one really knew what was going on and not everyone turned up. Crafting each of the slides between 6 of us also took a long time because everyone’s inputs had to be considered. We could have done this more efficiently by splitting up the workload and assigning people different jobs. This would have also been useful in the the research stage instead of everyone just researching everything.
