Editorial Illustration

In the article Eyes Wide Shut there is a word, "complicit" which means to be involved with others in an activity that is unlawful or morally wrong. This story highlights how although the New Zealand Defence Force is proud of their track record in Afghanistan our political and military leaders would rather not have this story told.

With this in mind this is my reason for the illustration that I came up with. In the background I wanted to use words that seemed to recur in the article I think I would’ve liked the opacity of the words to be lighter so you can only just make them out but they still have relevance.

One of the reasons I used the the female figure is because I’m a Parent and one of the youngest victims a 6 year old girl was found by her Father. As a Mother I can sympathise these women are waiting for the return of their husbands, sons and children.

I choose to use the New Zealand Flag as a blindfold because of our involvement, maybe it is all of us who are blind and have our eyes wide shut when our own defence force is trying to keep their involvement under wraps?

Guilty, human rights, degrading blood, flexi-cuffed, innocent are just some of the words I choose from the article and used in my background design. This image also needed to be scanned to my email so I could work on it further if needed. 

I was wanting to add words from the article and use it as the background. I also wanted to change the opacity down so the words are barely visible.
I ended up writing the words on a separate piece of paper with vivid the using the light box I copied the text straight onto a copy of my illustration.

No Doubt

Rock Steady Album Cover

Lyle suggested that I use text like this as it won't detract from my illustration.

I would like to credit Jason for helping me with the skin tone and shadows on the face I deleted the layer but I know I should've kept this as an experiment. I'm also realising the importance of the layers as it's been a hard for me to get my head around but it's helpful if you need to fix anything or add a detail later.

I'm not happy how my image is hanging in mid air before I saved this I should've placed it to the very bottom. I would also like to credit Katie when I realised my original version was landscape and she helped me to change it to portrait in doing this the words in the background are lost and probably doesn't really make sense now.  Everything is still a huge learning curb for me.