Poor Little Billy
Poor Little Billy
Student Project - fall 2019
Adobe Illustrator, “Elements of Criminal Investigation” by Paul Weston and Kenneth Wells
This book is a “détournement” or a rerouting or hijacking of a different piece. It was made using only imagery found in the book “Elements of Criminal Investigation” by Paul Weston and Kenneth Wells. I paired the cold, occasionally gruesome diagrams with my own story of a little boy with a habit of messes, creating a children’s book with an unsettling twist. As the reader gets further along in the book, they get the sense that something isn’t right. I wanted this transition to be subtle and to go unnoticed until the end when the “ice cream” splatters can be clearly recognized as blood splatters and the recognition hits that everything in the book has had an ulterior meaning. I allowed the imagery to dictate the layout which led an unconfined, free-flowing composition that changes with every spread. This way of working was much more experimental than anything I had ever done, but I found it to be empowering and something that I would like to explore more in future pieces.
Examples of images used in the source material