In this series, I gave myself an assignment to develop alternate illustrations for various different news stories I found interesting. I've been interested in editorial illustration (and particularly editorial collage) for a long time, so I thought what better way to get myself working in this area than to assign myself some stories and try to create some graphics for them. These are not graphics officially related to these articles - they're just personal projects.
Illustration for "How much electricity does AI consume?" via The Verge. This article investigates the massive amounts of electricity and energy used to train the latest AI models. I wanted to highlight more of the environmental impact aspect of the story by including the lower image of a forest fire. The top part of the image shows a shot of a server room with a laptop and profile illustration of a brain illustrating the infrastructure needed to make our everyday computers and smartphones "smarter". The ripped paper effect between the images gives a sense of revealing the the forest fire image below the top image - giving an impression of revealing a cost that had been hidden.
Illustration for "Putin says Russia prefers Biden to Trump but criticizes current US policy" for the Associated Press. The article details commentary made by Russian president Vladimir Putin about his preference for Biden to win the upcoming U.S. presidential election. I wanted to give the sense of Putin's involvement in the U.S. election being the focal point behind the article by including him in the foreground. The image of him speaking into microphones fit perfectly for the story's focus on his commentary and the potential implications they may have for U.S. politics.
Alternate illustration for the story "Generative AI Has Ushered In the Next Phase of Digital Spirituality". The rise of AI and its involvement in our daily lives has spurred wide speculation about its potential uses. One of the more nascent applications detailed in this article is using Large Language Models trained on religious texts as a kind of "spiritual AI guru" for users to converse with and ask guidance from. For this graphic, I wanted to blend images from religious and technological settings - creating a sort of surrealist take on the article. Two people dressed in religious regalia are depicted with robotic objects melded into their bodies, depicting the fusion of AI and spirituality discussed in the article.
Alternate illustration for "How to make your anger work for you" for Vox. This piece looks into how anger can be used productively and how to deal with this often misunderstood emotion in a healthy way. I wanted to create a straightforward alternate illustration for this story and the image of the person yelling fit perfectly. Fire is a common metaphor for anger, so I knew I wanted to include this in the final graphic. After experimenting with some ideas of superimposing the fire over the man's face, I decided to create some space in the image and create an effect of the fire erupting from him. The rings around the central image give a sense of heat or anger radiating outward, while the gritty texture and grain fill the remaining space of the image and convey messy, rough connotations associated with anger.