Making of: Illustration for Mortar Magazine

My illustration for the Mortar Magazine article, “We Know These Winds”

My first commissioned editorial illustration of the year was for a beautifully written article about the author’s difficult choice to stay or leave town when staring down the unknown of the LA fires as they rolled in.

The text conjured lots of images for me, which were fun to explore in the early brainstorming stage.

Early brainstorming with smaller thumbnail sketches - testing out ideas and compositions.

I took bits of the ideas I felt were working the best and refined them into three different, clear directions to send to the Art Director (Holly Catford).

Just the pencil sketch would have been enough to send, but I’d done the grayscale explorations for my own curiosity and benefit, so I just sent them along as well.

The Art Director chose the first concept, so that’s the one I developed further with line refinement and color exploration.

A selection of the many color iterations I explored.

Color is fun, but it can so quickly snowball into, like, a hundred slightly different variations. I had to rein myself in. The story specifically mentioned the air at one point being filled with orange smoke, so I chose that as my anchor color for the sky.

Then, I decided on using purples and greens to suggest tension between clean, fresh air, and safety (green) and smoke, uncertainty, and danger (purple). The yellows and pinks complement the orange sky and help balance everything out.

The final illustration!

One thing I knew early on is that I would use my favorite Procreate brush pen (“Mono Fountain” from True Grit Texture Supply’s Monomania kit 💛) and flat colors, since that’s the burgeoning style I’ve found to feel most authentic to me lately, and the less choices I have to make when doing new things, the much, much better.