Artist, Illustrator, Designer: John Potter - Escape Key Graphics
This is the cover illustration and design for Richard Sacks' book Ijeoma. The book is a story about a young mom from Nigeria and her experiences with genital mutilation, custody and immigration battles, and more.
The original concept was far more complex (kind of a collage), but we decided something that could hold up well when greatly reduced was better.
The stitched mouth was both a metaphor for genital mutilation and the attempts of people to silence her. The concept beyond the stitched mouth was a bold portrait of a strong and defiant, young, attractive, Nigerian woman.
The original concept was far more complex (kind of a collage), but we decided something that could hold up well when greatly reduced was better.
The stitched mouth was both a metaphor for genital mutilation and the attempts of people to silence her. The concept beyond the stitched mouth was a bold portrait of a strong and defiant, young, attractive, Nigerian woman.
The illustration is an acrylic painting on a stretched canvas 18"x24". I used lots of reference photography, but didn't use any one single model. The woman you see in the illustration is one hundred percent fictional and a product of my imagination only. Hiring a model for reference photography would have been a good idea, but I didn't. This is one reason I felt comfortable changing her looks a lot as work progressed.
I photographed the finished painting with a Nikon D3500 DSLR. There was a little retouching and some color adjustments in Photoshop as requested by the client. Title design and graphics were done in Adobe Illustrator.
