Contemporary Editorial Illustration

Editorial · Editorial · Illustration

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Contemporary Editorial Illustration, Flat shapes, textured brush and people drawn with real character — Cafe scene, flat colour

Recipe

The style is the recipe. The subject is yours.

GPT Image

gpt-image-1

Updated 8 Aug 2026

Full sentences. Describe the scene, then the medium, then the flaws you want kept in.

Make it yours

The recipe is the style, not the picture. Put your own subject in and the prompt updates.

Prompt

A contemporary editorial illustration for a magazine feature about city life. Four friends eating at an outdoor table, drawn in flat shapes with a grainy brush texture over every colour, warm limited palette of terracotta, olive, cream and navy. Loose confident line, simplified faces without detailed features, casual perspective that ignores strict vanishing points, generous negative space around the group. No outlines around every shape, only where they help.

Use the examples as a reference

Download the examples

Send the example as an input image to the images.edits endpoint alongside the prompt, or attach it in ChatGPT. It follows composition closely, so describe your subject firmly or it will copy the example.

Recommended settings

Size: 1024 x 1024
Quality: High
Background: Opaque
Output: PNG

Tips

1Grainy texture over flat colour is the entire difference between this and generic vector art.
2Simplified faces without detailed features keeps it editorial rather than cartoonish.
3Ask for negative space. Editorial illustration has to breathe next to a column of text.