Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
D&AD 2012 Student Awards - Illustration - Little White Lies magazine cover.
Brief:
Create an original cover illustration for Little White Lies magazine, depicting the main character of one of our five favourite films of 2011: Drive, Black Swan, The Tree of Life, Super 8, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
I've chosen Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy not even because I really liked the movie itself, but being a great fan of Gary Oldman I thought it will be lots of fun to make a portrait of his.
To create this image I began with cutting out the face features from the scrim, a fabric that one can find in any printmaking studio. I made four different layers of the cut-outs, which gave the tonal variation and shading of the face. Scanned cut-outs were than used to make the screens for the screen printing process.
I also decided to print an etching version of this image, which proved particularly challenging. Since I wanted to achieve a different thickness of the line for each layer, I came up with the process of applying aquatint on the zinc plate first, and then (while the plate is still hot) rolling it with the soft ground, which was then used to get the impression from the scrim cut-out. The final image is printed from a single zinc plate.
The left-over scrim was used for some collagraph experiments.