"Vancouver Special Matures to Star Status" article illustration design for my Illustrating Literature class.

I just had the critique in my Illustrating Literature class for an assignment that required creating one full-page for a short story or magazine article. Continuing my obsession with the Vancouver Special design houses, I decided to do my project on an article out of the Globe and Mail, about the Vancouver Special house being redesigned (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/the-vancouver-special-matures-into-star-status/article1710440/). I'm really excited by this project because although it's not perfect, it displays what I have learned in my Digital Illustration class in the past two months. The digital world no longer frightens me, keeping me at a distance, and intimidating me. In fact, I think that I'm going to utilize what I've learned more in my other classes, and I'm even thinking about getting a tablette for digital drawing. For this assignment, I used a combination of Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, as well as traditional tracing paper, and ink drawing. Here is what I came out with, along with some images of my process.



These Vancouver Special homes are commonly disliked by many people within Vancouver, and the surrounding suburbs for their boxy, undesirable aesthetic. They were built and spread around the lower mainland like weeds, for their practicality in using the lot space, and for their familiarity for the city contractors.

Building off that metaphor of Vancouver Special houses as weeds, wide-spreading, and a nuisance, commonly thought of as pests to most, yet beautiful to others, I began to think about the houses as little dandelions. I thought that it was fitting with the article, and would make a good full-page illustration to draw the viewer into the story. The red background and title type are meant to emphasize the "star status" of the Vancouver Special houses, as it references an old Hollywood theme.