One of my secret favourite features of issue 1 was the London DIY walk. Not only the walk itself was a lot of fun, but there were a lot of the shops included I DO go to every time we are in London. Furthermore a lot of work went into the illustration of this article. You might remember the maps and introduction pages to each new district. Today we want to tell you a little bit about how we put all of it together.

The first step was to draw all the maps by hand. I used a simple Google maps print and drew the most important streets on transparent paper. These maps were then scanned again and edited in Photoshop (contrast, clarity etc.). I used a seamless background from Lost and Taken (a great ressource site!) as background for the whole page. Then I added all the paint drops (Photoshop Watercolor brushes – this is a pack from Deviant Art). In Indesign I added all the text as well as the headlines (font: Weltron Urban)

Looking at those pages I somehow had the feeling that something was missing. Without further ado I decided to add some watercolor illustrations. They are hand-painted, scanned and placed in Photoshop, put on “Multiply”. Some of you might even remember the evening I made them because I couldn’t keep myself from tweeting some images ;) (which means: you should follow us on Twitter to get some inside scoops of sisterMAG production ;))

If you haven’t done so already: you can download all of the maps as free PDF here! Lets see what we’ll come up with for issue N°2, which is not that far away – there will be another city walk and maybe I have to get out my paints once again ;) Have a lovely day – I am working on the cover for issue 2 today!
Yours, Thea