EDITORIAL:
MAIN ILLUSTRATIONS
As part of my illustration degree with the Open College of the Arts, I had to choose an editorial piece to illustrate and I selected one from The New Yorker by D T Max, entitled Can Turning Office Towers into Apartments Save Downtowns?
It focuses on FiDi, Manhattan’s financial district in New York, and how property developer Nathan Berman is buying up office buildings – nationwide they are “only 50% full” – and transforming them into residential apartments. So far he’s converted eight in the area.
Partnering with architect John Cetra, the writer pays particular attention to a building on 55 Broad and how its 400,000-sq-ft of office space is being gutted, reformed into one-bed or studio apartments, targeting the young, generating a potential annual rental income of $30 million.
When discussing his methods, he described “the effort to extract as much residential space as possible out of such buildings to solving a Rubik’s Cube”.
Further in the text, 55 Broad is described as a “three-tired wedding cake” as well as “a dull stack of boxes” and taking a closer look at the building myself via Google Maps and through various online websites, I started to see how the idea of the Rubik’s Cube, wedding cake and this lucrative business “marriage” between Berman and Cetra could form an interesting illustration to accompany the text.
This map is part of a series which highlights some of the most splendid places to visit in France. This piece focuses on the Aude and presents the twelve locations I would personally recommend to families looking to explore the Aude in summer.
This illustration is designed to spotlight the essential relationship between krill (tiny shrimp-like creatures) and baleen whales (like humpbacks and blues - the latter is featured) and how their poo actually fertilizes the ocean. Rich in nutrients, it feeds the phytoplankton that krill (and the rest of the ocean food web) rely on.
Whales don’t just eat krill, they help create the conditions for krill to survive (most of the animals from penguins to seals in Antarctica, for example, depend on krill).
The ocean used to support much higher krill and whale numbers, but today the industrial krill harvesting (among other invasive practices) is devastating that fine balance.
Studies from Stanford and Nature Communications show that current krill catch levels, which have quadrupled in the last 30 years, could threaten whale recovery just as their populations are starting to rebound after being nearly wiped out by whaling.
Source: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/09/krill-harvesting-threatens-whale-recovery
This illustration highlights the resilience of barnacles, specifically the Tetraclita rubescens barnacle that is literally bending over backwards to survive climate change.
Scientists studied over 1,000 photos of Tetraclita rubescens from 30 Pacific coast sites between 2017 and 2022. They discovered that in Baja California a striking ~29 % of these barnacles now grow in a bent shape, leaning sideways instead of upright cones.
Study links:
https://newatlas.com/biology/barnacles-bent-shells-invasive-snails
https://www.southampton.ac.uk/oes/news/2023/11/barnacle-bends-shape.page
Warm‑water predatory snails, previously restrained to the tropics, are creeping north as oceans warm in the phenomenon called tropicalisation. These bigger, toxin‑armed snails prey easily on the usual conical barnacles. The bent shells obscure a vulnerable opening, thwarting attacks.
Cooler northern regions like California haven’t seen this trend, no bent morphs and no tropical snails!
The cost: Bent barnacles pay in slowed growth and reduced reproduction, an evolutionary trade‑off to avoid becoming snail dinner.
For my illustration I used the shape of the snail type Stramonita biserialis, to house the Pacific Ocean on the left and US and Mexico territory on the right, divided by the coastline which features barnacle icons that bend with proximity to Baja.
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I created this image to illustrate a particular aspect of a certain news stories covering the devastating fires in California in January 2025.
I found out that almost 40% of Californian prisoners are Hispanic white, nearly 30% are Black, 20% White and the rest "other", as the BBC reported that 900 incarcerated firefighters were deployed to serve. The LA Times stated that inmate crews account for as much as 30% of the state's
wildfire force.
The prisoners are paid between $5.80 and $10.24 a day when the state's minimum wage is $16.50 an hour. Non-prisoner firefighters are paid between $147,000 and $352,000 a year.
This piece was created to accompany an editorial piece about balance which is explained by a humorous illustration of a flamingo, a balance expert, on a beach ball in the sea, managing to keep afloat with multivitamin drink mix AG1 on one side and a hedonistic cocktail in the other. I used a limited colour palette to create more impact and to make it simple and easily understandable.
This piece was designed to accompany an article that looked at whether pets are becoming smarter.
