Under the Cov­er: Petra Eriksson

In the first of a new series, we’re going to be shin­ing a spot­light on the amaz­ing illus­tra­tors and artists who help to make Lit­tle White Lies one of the best-look­ing mag­a­zines on the shelf. First up, we had a chat with Petra Eriks­son who is respon­si­ble the cov­er of our 102^nd issue, inspired by Luca Guadagnino’s Chal­lengers. We asked her to paint a por­trait of her work­ing life and give some details on how she would approach such a project.

LWLies: Paint us a pic­ture of your work space. Do you feel it’s per­fect, or do you have plans to enhance it?

Eriks­son: I have a stu­dio in a big indus­tri­al build­ing in Eind­hoven that is shared with a lot of oth­er cre­ative peo­ple. I love my space, most­ly because of the real­ly big win­dows and all the light it lets in but I def­i­nite­ly need to give this place some more love. I want to get a prop­er book case to dis­play some of the cov­ers I have worked on but also to bet­ter organ­ise the art and design books I have for inspi­ra­tion. And at some point I also want to add a colour­ful com­fort­able arm­chair or sofa to make it a bit more cosy.

What’s the first prac­ti­cal thing you did for this LWLies cov­er commission?

I start­ed the process by look­ing through all of the ref­er­ence pho­tos that had been shared with me, as well as gath­er­ing a few extra images on my own to make sure that I could see the three actors’ faces from dif­fer­ent angles. I also watched the trail­er a cou­ple of times to try to pick up some details from it and the over­all feel­ing of the film.

LWLies cov­ers always con­tain por­traits – what’s your approach for draw­ing peo­ple / likeness?

Get­ting the like­ness right can be real­ly tricky, espe­cial­ly in these over­lap­ping por­traits where a lot of things need to be sim­pli­fied and where the over­lap­ping shapes them­selves can take away from the like­ness of a per­son. To try to get it as good as pos­si­ble I look at many pho­tos of the peo­ple, ide­al­ly pho­tos from dif­fer­ent angles to find spe­cif­ic details in their facial fea­tures and expres­sions that will help. Specif­i­cal­ly I’m look­ing at the shape of the eyes, nose, mouth, eye­brows and dim­ples or how their face changes when they smile etc. I find that if I get these things right that helps a lot with cre­at­ing an over­all likeness.

For this cov­er, tell us how you worked with the colours and the lay­er­ing to achieve such a vibrant effect?

Cre­at­ing these kinds of lay­ered art­works is a bit of a puz­zle so I tried a lot of dif­fer­ent colour direc­tions before I land­ed on a ver­sion that I was hap­py with. I want­ed to incor­po­rate as many of the brand colours as pos­si­ble but I knew I want­ed to add some more colours that would work well in their faces. I also real­ly want­ed to work with the light blue of the palette to pick up the colour of Zendaya’s jack­et in one of the shots of the movie and I knew it would pair well with a warm and intense orange-red colour. Those two colours togeth­er with the off white and black became the foun­da­tion of the palette and the rest fell into place from that.

The lay­er­ing is some­times tricky because it needs to be done in a way where it doesn’t make the faces look weird. It’s always eas­i­er with the clothes that can be more graph­ic but the shapes that goes into the face often needs to be a bit more tuned down to not inter­fere too much with the facial details.

Is there some­one you’ll show your ear­ly drafts to for instant, hon­est feedback?

It depends a lot from project to project, but some­times I will share it with my part­ner Guillem, he’s not a design­er but I know he will always be hon­est with me 🙂

How do you know when one of your art­works is finished?

Usu­al­ly I decide that some­thing is fin­ished when I feel hap­py with the dynam­ic between colours and shapes over the whole image. Dur­ing the process there are often the moments of feel­ing that some­thing is a lit­tle bit off, maybe a shape doesn’t fit in with the oth­er shapes or some colour is tak­ing too much (or too lit­tle) focus and the process is a lot about tweak­ing these ele­ments until I feel satisfied.

How can our read­ers sup­port you and fol­low your work? 

They can find me at insta­gram @petraerikssonstudio and also at my web­site www​.petraeriks​son​.com. I’ve been on a social media break but I am plan­ning to get back to it as I’m real­ly enjoy­ing the chance to con­nect with peo­ple and to be able to share a bit more of my process and thoughts there. I real­ly appre­ci­ate peo­ple con­nect­ing to me and fol­low­ing me there as it helps me share my art with more people.

LWLies 102: The Chal­lengers issue is avail­able now