New Statesman Cover

Here is a run through of the cover that I recently was commissioned to illustrate for New Statesman magazine. This was a fairly last minute weekend turnaround, with the work coming through on Friday afternoon and deadline on Monday afternoon. The brief was quite prescriptive and the art director had a pretty clear idea of the image that was required. They wanted a hill to the right with a busy slum and to the left on an adjacent hill was a large mansion, with the slum seeming to tower over the mansion. I found some decent reference of favelas in Brazil that would be a good base for the slum drawing. I worked on the illustration in a similar way to the German Wings landscape that I drew earlier in the year. First I roughly penciled in the shape of the hill and then filled in the buildings using a small range of colours. This was pretty time consuming and took almost a whole day to fill in. Here is a scan from early on in the drawing.

Once the main image was drawn any further changes could be made or added in using Photoshop. There had to be a dark area to the bottom and space in the top left for the title and other front page copy.

There had been a late change on Monday morning from the design team and the mansion had to be replaced with skyscrapers to emphasise the rich vs poor feeling of the cover. These were drawn to fit over the existing mansion and hill and then cropped in on the computer.

The left side of the slum also had to be cropped to allow more room for the titles and emphasise the hill. I then added in a blue wash for the sky which helped tie the whole thing together.

Here is the final printed cover.

This was a really tight deadline when taking into account the last minute changes and level of detail involved in the drawing. Very pleased though with the end result and ultimately the changes did make for a better cover image.