Tennessee Williams: Book Jacket Series
This is a student Tennessee Williams book jacket series for his most well known plays: the Glass Menagerie, a Street Car Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
My inspiration for this series was to show the duality of each of the plays of what is reality and what is fiction. To achieve this, I created an acrylic hard cover so that there could be an interior illustration that could be seen through die cuts on the jacket.
The challenge with this piece was finding a way to tie all of the jackets together through similar visuals. The solution was to use paper cut outs to create the book jacket illustrations. Using a limited color palette due to the color of the paper was an additional challenge.
The inspiration for the paper cut out illustrations come from “A Streetcar Named Desire” is the repeating use of a song which says “It is only a Paper Moon”. To me, it represents the fragility of the facade of what is reality and what is fiction. Using a delicate material like paper allows to further exemplify this theme as well as to add visual texture and a flat illustration style which mirrors the interior illustrations.