Getting the Gist

This is the second exercise in part one of the course. It involves choosing an editorial piece to illustrate, reading it, highlighting key wwords and/or phrases then extracting those words/phrases and reconstructing as a concept for an illustration.


I chose a piece in the Guardian online about WikiLeaks. Here is my highlighted version of the text: Julian Assange’s internet cut by Ecuadorian embassy


I guess the relevant keywords are:

• Ecuador
• Julian Assange
• temporarily cut internet
• U.S. presidential election
• leaked emails

So I constructed the sentence:

I am going to create an image about the Ecuadorian government cutting internet access to Julian Assange who has assylum in their London embassy, to prevent leaked emails from interfering in the U.S. presidential election.

Having got this far I started working out some ideas out as thumbnail sketches. The initial sketch uses ideas I got from other news about how Julian Assange’s assylum is more like confinement. I decided not to use this as the assignment reads more as what you get from the actual editorial. So I decided to focus on the roll of Ecuador, using the flag, and the parallel race to the whitehouse.



I quite like the finished piece to the right which I had to redo, due to paper pilling under masking fluid. I would like the green to be a flatter wash, which I could have achieved with a better brush. The debate stand of Donald Trump’ in the front left is unevenly coloured.

Following Tutor Feedback

I reversed the image so that it reads more from left to right.