This illustration was for an article in The Skinny about NHS’s 70th birthday, and how the immigrants who make it work feel about it.
It all starts in a physical sketchbook. I look at the article (or the parts that I have access to when contacted) and start writing down phrases and words from the text which have interesting imagery. Primarily I looked at these two quotes “Matthew unintentionally fell into the NHS” and “When I say I have the NHS in my blood, I don’t just mean the various blood transfusions, operations, medications, and check-ups that have kept me alive since I was born”. After this initial stage, I research more information and themes related to the text, such as the ideas of an Irish hard border and how it could be used to conceptualise this weird juxtaposition of celebrating 7 decades of universal healthcare while a Tory government dismantles it piece by piece through privatisation and Brexit lies such as the infamous £350 mil backtrack.
So with these ideas forming I throw them together and see what comes out. What I can mix and match, make metaphors of, create narrative threads out of, while trying to keep a loose thread of logic to create something interesting. I try to write down every idea and relation, no matter how absurd or distant or seemingly unrelated. It helps to get bad ideas out until you’re only left with good ideas, but also I often realise later that I can use bits and bobs I previously thought were bad in new ways and they can end up pretty cool. I draw small squares (or rectangles, or whatever is roughly the dimensions of what the final image needs to be) to create compositions and quickly see how I can make ideas interact with each other. After I have a decent amount thumbnails down to get a rough composition, I draw slightly bigger sketches to show more information to myself, and then use those bigger sketches as reference to redraw directly to digital.
After making some digital visuals displaying the concepts, I send them off for approval for whichever one the AD/commissioner likes the most. I try to create a bit of a mix of visuals from the weirder/more interpretive which feel more like fractures of ideas to the more grounded, subtler in terms of concept but straight forward through narrative within in the image.
With the image development itself after the conceptual stage, if I’m completely happy with the visual I will use it as a base for the final image. If I think I can make a better composition, I will redraw a few iterations of it until I get something I’m happy (or happier) with given the time restraints. Usually I block in colours and shapes over the sketch, and add lines and textures and draw over parts I want to change.
In this case I blocked in greyscale shapes and then added colour after on layers set to multiply and colour modes. At this point I have to apologise that I didn’t grab images of the cake/table in greyscale or show the amount of different ways I drew the arms and faces and how many different backgrounds I actually went through. I am only realising while writing how shit these screengrabs are and how they don’t actually show how the illustration was truly developed--if I do another development post I will grab screens during the creation rather than after.
Anyways, after blocking in shapes, messing with colours, adding details and fixing up stuff, I decided to crop the image to create a better composition. Unfortunately the poor chap on the left had to be removed because it felt awkward having only part of him in the frame, so I added a doctorly noticeboard to help balance the illustration a bit. I always create images at a larger size than necessary for easy cropping, and in case I want to print it out at a larger size later for my portfolio or other reasons.
Sorry for being a bit wordy, I haven’t written something this long for a while and it was kind of cathartic!
tl;dr words -> thumbnails -> digital visuals -> final image
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