Addendum to Assignment 5

I failed to point out in the brief that there is no obligation for you submit your illustration for selection by the Big Issue editorial staff.
If you choose not to participate that is completely reasonable. You will just complete the assignment as you would any other.

Assignment 5

Assignment 5

Editorial Illustration

For this assignment you are to create a full page editorial illustration to accompany a story in the Big Issue Magazine.

The Big Issue has a circulation of approximately 35,000 and its readership is a very sophisticated one.

Many of Australia's leading illustrators including Dean Gorissen, Nigel Buchanan, Andrew Joyner, Sonia Kretschmer and Andrea Innocent have contributed to the magazine.

The Big Issue have kindly offered to run the most appropriate of our illustrations (provided it is of publication standard) in a future issue, so this is a great opportunity to:

a) have a published piece in your folio

and

b) have your work seen by 35,000 people.


The aim of an editorial pice is to compliment a story. It should add to the story without explaining it in detail.

The dimensions of this illustration are:

196mm w x 251mm h.

It will be full colour.

Your illustration must have 5mm bleed all around.

You are to provide me with three concept sketches. Together we will choose the best one. You will then develop that sketch to a high standard.

Your final sketch must be approved by me before you proceed to final art.

I will present the best three illustrations to the editorial staff of the Big Issue, and they will choose the one most suitable for publication.

Assignment due: Friday 13 June

Cleaning Frenzy

 Koren Helbig

It was perfectly reasonable that the apartment should descend into such a fetid tip. Not only the domain of youngsters who had yet to develop a mature penchant for cleanliness, the flat had also become a short-term lodging house for all and sundry passing through, some paying their way, others friends of friends who crashed gratis.

The sum total of these assorted residents was wrought large in the kitchen, where barely an inch of counter space could be seen beneath heaped piles of flotsam and jetsam. Plastic tubs filled with foods of varying ages and conditions. Sticks of abandoned bread long since petrified. Spice canisters wriggling with pudgy white worms. Plastic bags leaking foul-odoured fluids. Half-drunk bottles of wine likely untouched since the Middle Ages. And everything encrusted with a horridly grimy and sticky film of oil, layers of the stuff, proving thousands of meals had passed across the stovetop since the last big clean.

For a neat freak like myself, this kitchen was akin to hell.

For the first few months, however, I bore the horror. I, too, was potentially only passing through and the mammoth task of sterilising this wasteland seemed disproportionate to the time I would actually spend enjoying the fruits of my labour. Like everyone else in the flat, I shunned cleaning accountability purely because I didn’t consider myself a long-term resident. It was someone else’s problem.

I kept my own room spick and span, a refuge from the evil of the common areas. The drains in the apartment repeatedly blocked, leaving the bathroom sink a fetid waterhole of toothpaste spittings, mucky soap suds and ends of whiskers shorn from the menfolk’s faces. That wasn’t anyone’s fault. The building was old, constructed around the middle of last century in the Spanish seaside city of Alicante, well before elevators became a standard addition, as evidenced by the four flights of stairs we all puffed up to reach our own front door.

The four-bedroom house, however, was ideally located smack-bang in the centre of town, minutes from our little slice of Mediterranean coastline, one street over from the central markets, and a short walk to the party neighbourhood. Plus, rent was cheap. Herein lay the attraction, the reason we all opted to call the flat home – those on short-term work contracts, the vacationers stopping by for a few day’s bargain bedding, and me, an Australian living a few months in this city and that as I tried to see as much of Spain as possible.

At some point though, I realised the small and rather grimy city of Alicante had worked its way into my heart and I desired to stay longer than the two months I’d originally planned. I wanted to make this cruddy flat home, despite its frat house-style horrors. Because, it turned out, location was not the only benefit. I had grown to like the few housemates who were staying longer term and enjoyed the miscellany of others who popped through. Of course, the grubby living circumstances weren’t confined to this house alone; near everyone who has lived with people who know each other only by the sheer coincidence of shared living quarters has witnessed how cleaning accountability can go so completely AWOL. Better the devil you know, I thought. Living with pleasantly likeminded people (cleanliness levels aside) who weren’t closet serial killers or reclusive hobbits seemed worth the mess.

Nonetheless, I began fantasising about a spick and span kitchen, dreaming of all the gourmet cuisine I would smilingly serve from atop its gleaming bench tops. A fumigation was imminent.

Four hours of my life slipped away while sanitising that cesspit. Four entire hours of scrubbing and scouring and trashing decaying unmentionables. I scraped layers of built up grease and grime off the shelves with a knife, ditched food that had expired around the same time as the dinosaurs and chipped ancient food splatters from what I discovered were actually white tiles. My housemates popped in and out, offering the odd word of encouragement, yet when I was done no one seemed particularly impressed with the extraordinary feat I had just executed. Life went on, a little more hygienically but otherwise unchanged.

I still live here in this crumbling old building, where forgotten food often quite literally takes on a life of its own and the drains block every few weeks. I have no immediate plans to move, which sometimes makes me wonder: perhaps its time to clean the bathroom?