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.