Illustration Photography

During this tutorial you will learn how to create illustration photographs. These are currently very popular in advertising. This lesson is in four parts:

Part 1 - What is illustration photography?
Part 2 - Who is Andreea Robescu?
Part 3 - How to take an illustrative photograph
Part 4 - How to add brush stroke illustrations to your photograph

WAGOLL:

Below are some of the illustration photographs you can create following these tutorials. Click on the 'student examples' link to see real student's creations.

Student Examples

Illustrator Artists Examples

Part 1: What is illustration photography?

It is no understatement to say that illustration photography in advertising and other publishing products is HUGE at the moment. But what exactly is it? During this lesson you will investigate some illustration photographers and discover how this movement is taking over the advertising world.

Click on the links below to look at some real world ideas used in advertising:

There are a number of different ways that illustrations can be added to a photograph. During the editing stage you will learn how to use Photopea to do this.

Part 2: Who is Andreea Robescu?

Search for Andreea Robescu on Google images. She is fantastic at adding whimsical brush strokes to photographs. She has worked with a variety of popular brands such as Diesel, Burberry, Dior and Gucci. She has also created the artwork for the front cover of magazines such as Harpers Bazaar, Dazed, I-D and Vogue.
Save your favourite Andreea Robescu photographs to your device.
Briefly describe exactly what the illustrations add to the photograph by answering these questions; What effect do they have on the viewer? What feelings do they generate? What added meanings are they able to give?

Note to teachers:

Andreea Robescu is a fantastic illustrative artist. But she does use some inappropriate language on some of her images that can be found on her website. These don't appear to show up on a Google image search. However, you may want to double check this for younger students.

Part 3: How to take an illustrative photograph

Now that you have more of an idea what illustration photography is, watch this YouTube video that demonstrates how to take a illustration photograph using just he objects you find around your home: https://youtu.be/ATSbLVDllLk
Take a variety of different photographs. At least 3 photographs of 5 different objects around your home (so 15 photographs in total). Selfies work very well, however, it is understandable if you don't want to take photographs of yourself. You don't have to. You can take photographs of objects and items instead such as bags, shoes, toys, plant pots etc

Part 4: How to Add whimsical brush stroke illustrations to your photograph

In part 2, you took a variety of photographs. In this lesson you will learn how to add simple brush stroke illustrations to your photographs using Photopea.

look through your photographs and choose a few that are the most in focus. Don't worry too much if it is slightly dark or if the angle of the shot isn't exactly perfect. We will fix that with editing in this lesson.
Watch the following YouTube video in full: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdKKmWXsceU It will teach you a variety of ways to add simple illustrations to your photographs in the style of Andreea Robescu.
Have your saved Andreea Robescu photograph ready from part 2 or have the Google image search open whilst you edit to refer to.
You can access and edit your photographs using Photopea on your phone, but it is slightly easier to do this using a laptop/desktop computer. One easy way of transferring your photographs is to email it to yourself from your phone as an attachment. Then log onto your email using your laptop/desktop computer and save the photograph to your device. Then go to https://www.photopea.com/ and follow my YouTube tutorial above.

Lesson Resources

Right click on the images below to save them to your device. The images are the ones I used in my YouTube video above. You can use these to practice your editing skills on or you could start with your own illustrative photograph to edit. It is entirely up to you.

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