Digital Collage Editorial Illustration Process

I worked on a few digital collage editorial illustration pieces for a client over the weekend. Check out the process of putting this series of three together!

The whole thing is pretty involved. The illustration client provided me with three stories, all with a central theme of gifts you can give yourself. The gift of rest, the gift of creativity, and the gift of risk. They really liked this outfit of the day that I had shared last week, so we talked about moving forward in that digital collage art style.

I started with sketches. Lots of sketches. Tons of thumbnails, along with handwritten notes. As I read over the articles I was illustrating, I noted themes and phrases that jumped off the page at me as a starting point. I knew I wanted to tie everything together with more literal presents worked into the storytelling images…

I won’t bore you with the pages of thumbnails as I worked out the staging. Here’s some cleaned up drawings that were our starting point for edits:

I really liked the sense of motion in this drawing, and how I could play with the inside of the gift box as the person’s bedroom.

This concept was a jubilant hand bursting out of a gift bag, painting on a canvas – for this and the initial rest sketch, we decided to try imagery that was a little bit less literal.

This one was pretty much nailed from the get go. The idea of someone opening a present and finding a toy airplane inside, with little skydivers jumping into the air…

My rework on the gift of rest sketch brought things to a more zen place, with a gal sitting in an easy chair with her cup of tea, listening to birds sing outside her window.

And the gift of creativity shifted to involve more focus on people having a creative adventure together, but it wasn’t quite ready for the digital collage stage.

To make sure it looked more like they were on an adventure and less like they were escaping from a big scary box, the characters were shifted into poses that felt more powerful and independent.

So once the sketches were finessed into approved drawings, the digital collage stage happened! It was a process that involved lots of playing with drawing directly into Photoshop with my Wacom tablet, as well as bringing in a variety of hand painted textures and real world items to give the pieces visual interest.