MAGAZINE SPREAD OVERVIEW

For this assignment the task was to create a magazine spread based off a pre-existing article. The article I chose for this project was written about a street/graffiti artist named “Neckface.” The imagery and style that Neckface uses in his artwork were what I used to influence the design of this spread. Neckface’s artwork could be described as edgy and maybe even satanic at times. I attempted to capture some of this by using rough edges and high contrast in my design.

Process Sketches

Here are the thumbnail sketches that I drew up before I began putting together the actual spread. These sketches gave me the opportunity to see how different layouts might work. I ended up going with the sketch on the middle left. I liked this sketch because of how dynamic the title was, and the fact that it was simple which allowed me to expand more on the visual elements without the text getting lost in the clutter.

Neck Face as Graffiti Artist

Neck Face was born in 1984 in Stockton, California. As a child, he liked to read his grandmother’s collection of snuff magazines which had the pages with photos of the dead people that helped him to build an opinion of death as entertainment from his early age. His street artist’s career began during his junior year in high school when he started tagging walls of his hometown. He became known for his self-made stickers on the public objects. After becoming more experienced, he painted in San Francisco and soon decided to move to New York, where he attended School of Visual Arts (SVA) in Manhattan, for two years before dropping out. Besides being an artist, he is also an avid skateboarder and, in accordance with this passion, an art director at Baker Skateboards which has a collaboration with a number of famous brands such as Vans, Stussy, and Altamont Apparel. His street art is characterized by his “neck faced” creatures with the jagged teeth and pointed ears. For one of his numerous interviews, on the question about his fame and position in street culture, he said that he just goes with the flow:

Described as naïve and scratchy, his illustrative style received so many attentions which allowed him to move to gallery spaces and thus focus on different techniques and approaches, as drawing, painting, sharp metal masks, felt installations, and sculptures.

Neck Face’s Art

When it comes to his three-dimensional artworks, his sculpture shows the influences of the combine tradition of mixing different materials. Adopting this modern method and adapting it to his own creative expression, Neck Face reinterprets the practice of merging flatness with form, changing the context of objects and materials with an aim of presenting the usual with the changed definition. His multiple talents were also proved through his feature-length kung fu horror film Born Under a Bad Sign, directed by Isaiah Seret. Filmed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles in conjunction with Art in the Streets, it is a story of an ordinary man who became a ninja and a demon. In a series of strange inspirations, Neck Face’s exhibition No Mercy For The Weak at new Image Art Gallery in Hollywood, besides his prints originated from his researches of bar room practices, featured an altar devoted to the Night Stalker (Richard Ramirez) who died in prison. Following the tradition of painting inspired by bar room drama, his prints depict demons in the depth of their darkness carrying the clear messages as: “Don’t drink and drive.” His creatures continued to be born out of darkness on his works prepared for the solo show Drinking On The Job, held at New Image Gallery in Los Angeles in 2014. Inspired by the world of alcoholic hedonism, these drawings are vulgar in both theme and tone, saturated with the gloomy atmosphere related to bars and pubs. Compared to Banksy and described as “generally super famous in the cool parts of the art world”. When asked about his inspiration and creative process Neck Face answers:

“Sometimes it’s just fucked up the situation that I think of in my head, sometimes it’s what I would really like to do to someone, whether it would be an ex-girlfriend or somebody who pissed me off earlier in the day …”

Neck Face has exhibited alongside the most prominent street artists and his work can be seen internationally across the globe, in places as Melbourne, Sydney, Copenhagen, and Tokyo, in addition to appearing on billboards and buildings in the United States. Neck Face’s work has been featured in several publications such as Dazed and Confused, The New Order, and i-D Magazine.