Sometime during the past Christmas holidays I decided that I wanted to try my hand in a continuative, multishoot project: while I stil had free time and was in a somewhat relaxed atmosphere, I brainstormed for ideas and decided that I wanted to bring together my love for typography with my style of portraiture.

As we already (more or less consciously) associate distinct personalities to the more commonly used fonts, I thought that bringing these characters to life would be an interesting project and something that could be worked on and off through the year without having to discard working on other shoots.

Little did I know that I was getting myself into something of insane proportions: first my idea of including a brief history that could help flesh out the character of the font to non-obsessed fontaholics got me researching high and low for material, then my desire to include as many easter eggs about the history of the fonts into each portrait had me switch from one single shot to three, tied together in an editorial setting. Fast forward three months and after a ton of emails, preparations, countless hours of shooting, retouching, trial and error (and of course cursing!) the machine got finally rolling. This is the first of what I hope will be several chapters, enjoy!

I realise that the text is impossible to read like this, so click on the photos for a larger version! ^_^



Credits

model:Cleo Viper

make up:Claudia Malavasi

all the rest (type, copy, photos ecc) is from yours truly ^_^

BONUS: here’s a little backstage of the make up process. This was definitely the longest make up job I ever witnessed, lasting more than 10 hours! So kudos to lovely Claudia for the work and to Cleo for being a real trooper trough all of it!