Contemporary Editorial Illustration

Editorial · Editorial · Illustration

Recipe

The style is the recipe. The subject is yours.

The examples above were generated with Nano Banana Pro and Seedream 4.5. The recipes below are written for GPT Image and Flux, so treat the settings as a starting point rather than the exact run.

A description in plain sentences. This is the version to start with, and it works on any current image model. Settings below are the ones we used on GPT Image; treat them as a starting point.

Make it yours

The recipe is the style, not the picture. Put your own subject in and the highlighted part of the prompt changes.

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.

The prompt gets you close. Feed one of the examples in as a style reference for the rest. Download the images

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.

Settings on GPT Image

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.