I’ve been familiar with Hattie Stewart’s unmistakable style for a number of years, due to having previously stumbled across their instagram account, and liking what I saw. On their website I love the dedicated space for ‘personal work’ as well as professional projects. I feel I’m being let into a dream-like archive. I particularly enjoy looking at the displayed sketchbook pages for the different hand drawn type faces, use of bright colours, and collage effects. I like the full, packed usage of each spread and the elements of contrast (for example contrasting colours, and/ or black and white photos with bold coloured text over them).
The section of the website showcasing magazine covers that Stewart has collaged over feels like a great reference archive for a particular illustration style that I’d like to experiment with for my FMP. I really like the combination of serious, and strong, portrait photography, with cartoon-like, vibrant illustrations.
Viewing the ‘Covers’ section felt like looking into a fantasy world, or perhaps simply Hattie Stewart’s own imagination. On further looking-into – I realised at least some of the ‘covers’ are reimagined by Stewart but the Vogue covers existed to buy, on their own without the illustrations originally. Looking at the original images for some of the covers made me feel as though there was something missing in the space around each figure within the photographs; whereas I think I would’ve ordinarily viewed the original Vogue covers and seen a simplistic strength to them – I feel my personal tastes actually prefer Hattie Stewart’s reimaginings to the issues that were actually published.
Squirrel M. Lambert 