Ivy Wolk Spot Illustration

For this assignment, we were tasked with choosing an article or essay and creating a spot illustration that would appear alongside the piece. I proposed Ivy Wolk’s Substack essay, LA on my mind, I can’t breathe, which is a personal essay wherein Wolk talks about her complicated relationship with Los Angeles and her experience having grown up in Hollywood.

Preliminary Sketches

Process

My process was pretty standard as far as illustration goes. I worked with the pencil tool in Adobe Fresco and incorporated unusual neon accents.

I chose to keep the background as just outlines because I felt that coloring it in would make the image too constrained. By leaving it white on a white background, the canvas area is more open and it sort of allows the illustration to interact with the text.

I chose to go in the direction of a simple portrait of Ivy. There aren’t a lot of pictures of her on the internet, so I tried sketching out every selfie or headshot I could find and working from there.

You can find the essay here. It’s a lovely read :)