Benjamen Purvis

I do a lot of sketching to get my ideas across — it’s often the most efficient way for me to communicate. Sometimes I do a hasty scribble, and sometimes I take a little more time, like in the above pencil drawing I did for Mark Matcho to reference in his illustration for this article on hair loss drugs and their embarrassing sexual side effects:

I also sketch using low res photos in InDesign, like in this layout I put together for photographer Levi Brown to reference in his compositions:

I repeated the same photo of a blank cassette with the understanding that a stylist would track down different cassettes on eBay, write the names of convicted mobsters on them, then bang them up a little and wear them down to suggest they’d seen a lot of action. I drew that wire coming from the tape recorder in Illustrator, and made the mugshot in Photoshop (based on a tiny mugshot that was far too small to use). I wanted the photo to look like it had been photocopied and faxed.

Stylist Angela Campos printed my mugshot design and crumpled it to give it some life in Levi’s photo:

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