Little White Lies

Okay, so over the Christmas holiday, my brief was to design a magazine cover for the London based magazine; Little White Lies. There was a choice of 5 different films to be illustrated; Super 8, The Tree Of Life, Drive, Black Swan and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The front cover had to include the main character of the film, the title of the film and the LWL's masthead and this was my first response..

Just a portrait of Natalie Portman for the Black Swan cover. Due to being away from tutor/university, I resorted to my comfort zone; therefore this piece is completely tonal. However, after completion I decided to Google LWL's previous covers and saw that their Black Swan cover was similar to this piece so I decided to try again...

Natalie Portman again, this time as her alter ego in the film. To change my style a little, I decided to use colour on her facial features, particularly her eyes and lips to create emphasis. I tried to perfect her features as much as I could, to relate to her character's need for perfection within the film. Also the shape of her face itself is slightly thinner compared to my first attempt, this is to reflect the change in weight between her two characters.

My final composition..

In photoshop, I scanned in my second response, flipped the canvas to change the typical portrait and created a mirror image to represent how vain the character is in the film. I added the Little White Lies masthead in response to the brief and I added my own type. I chose calligraphy in particular to reference the ballet aspect of the film. Drawn in black fine liner; to reinforce the 'Black' Swan and feathers added onto the type to reflect the 'Swan' characteristics.

Artist Book

The outcome for this brief was to create 10 Limited Edition artist books, we had the choice of how many pages to include and whether all of them would be the same in each book or different combinations. The title of the book I was given was 'Safety On The Hills' by Kevin Walker (each individual had a different book title). The book itself describes the equipment needed and safety procedures for mountain climbing. 

At first, I felt uneasy about this brief, not due to creating my own artist book, but because I wasn't inspired by the title of the book I had to use. I decided I was going to enjoy this brief if I was to change the topic to fit in with what I wanted to achieve therefore I rearranged the letters of the book (and used some more than once) to create 'This Still Life'. With this title I had numerous ideas, each as strong as each other, however I wanted to introduce a new style of drawing and maybe use some collage techniques to explore outside of my comfort zone. 


I came across the photographs I'd taken during the 'Preston Vintage & Craft Fair' (in my older posts) and decided to draw images based on these due to the fact that most of them were of suitcases and I wanted to base my book on a topic that I hadn't drawn before. I also thought the contrast between drawing something that's usually on the move (suitcases) as still life would be interesting. Working A5 size throughout my book, I started by using just a black fine liner and adopted some of the line techniques used by Escher. Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898 - 1972) is a graphic artist, most famous for his impossible structures as well as his more realistic work. This particular piece of his work was my inspiration for my drawing techniques.

Here are some of my final images in black fine liner.

I really enjoyed creating these images, I liked exploring the mark making techniques for different suitcases and found it quite easy to do. With these images as a starting point, I decided to develop them using vintage papers I'd downloaded and collage them in Photoshop. Here are some of those images. 

After completing both sets of images, I had the decision of either creating my artist book using all black and white images, or all vintage papered images or a combination of both. After different opinions, I decided that the vintage paper images were more successful than the plain black and white, and made my artist book by printing them onto parchment myself. 


My artist book consisted of a recycled brown paper as the front cover, with an arrangement of suitcases and the letters 'This Still Life' as an A4 spread. I then had an insert of tissue paper before the initial first page. Each of my images was printed on the right hand side of the pages and stitched together by hand down the middle fold. I created each book the same however due to printing and measurement errors some are neater than others. I finished the format by presenting each book in button and string envelopes, with an address written as -

Jess Willcox

Artist Book

Limited Edition

TSL X10                                      

(This Still Life X 10)

- with a stamp in the appropriate corner as extra realism.


If I were to develop this project or redo certain aspects, I probably would have had my book professionally printed due to the fact that self printing was expensive, unreliable and time consuming. However the images themselves I am happy with, I liked the topic behind my artist book and the change of imagery, I like the line techniques I used, I think even the plain black fine liner images were just as interesting as the collaged images, I like exploring the use of vintage paper and collage and the fact that I included some typography in there as well. I think I've found another way of working and look forward to developing these aspects in future briefs. 

:)