Rob Ford Illustration
This is my first attempt at designing anything government orientated. The Centennial College Journalism students were to work with the Scarborough Observer to release a paper with a characiture of Toronto’s mayor, Rob Ford. I was asked by Journalist, Nick Tragianis to take part in this job.
The illustration was supposed to depict an ideal of the debate between the monorail and subway extentions. I was given a tagline and a basic idea of what they wanted “A depiction of Rob Ford giving a speech with a monorail in the background”. The speech had to incorporate the words “We’ve decided on a compromise… Monorail it is”.
Before going into designing/illustrating this piece I had to do some research to gain some intel on Rob Ford. What role does he play? What is he trying to accomplish? What do people think of him? After talking to several people, every single one of them exressed a disliking towards Ford. They used words like fat, abusive, angry, sweaty, egotistical and lousy to reflect his persona. Out of all these the topic of obesity reflected his character the most. So I looked up fat people who overun large cities as a pop culture influence and I ended up with Stay Puft marshmallow man of the Ghostbusters Franchise. While Rob was intednded to look like stay puft I wanted to make his face over the top and ugly. I used another popular culture reference to make up his face. I incorporated the influence of the Trollface (a popular Internet meme that has been circulating recently). Why did I go with trollface? Well trollface symbolizes someone who antagonizes and insults people to boost his own ego. A troll does not know when to stop and will continue doing things as he has done. For the art direction I went with vector illustration using Illustrator. I incorporating the lighting on Ford’s suit and used vector lines to create the mountain of grass.
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