More than a week before each new issue of the City Paper gets dropped off at a newspaper rack near you, the crew here is hard at work wrapping their heads around what to put on the cover. Most often than not, that means getting our ace photographer Jonathan Boncek to snap a few photos and enlisting the services of our art director, Scott Suchy, to work some Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop magic.
For this week’s Pride Issue, though, we went for something completely different, a hand-cut diorama of sorts. And we thought you guys might like to see how it was done.
Instead of working on the computer to create the Charleston cityscape composition seen on the cover, Suchy grabbed his Xacto knife and went to work, slicing and dicing images mounted thick vellum cardstock, attaching the elements to thin wooden supports, and assembling it all atop a foam block.
Suchy says the physical medium of the diorama allows for a more tactile feel for the scene, which is what he was going for. “It definitely catches little nuances and imperfections … Photoshop is just so clean,” Suchy says. “And also just to try something different.”
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