Reimagined cover for The Picture

Reimagined cover for The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.

The whole book turns on one idea: Dorian stays young and beautiful while his portrait quietly rots in his place, absorbing every sin. The painting becomes a mirror of who he really is while his outward appearance remains untouched.

So I flipped the usual setup.

The decaying figure lives inside the gilded frame, while Dorian himself becomes the shadow in the corner—faceless, reduced to two pale eyes watching what he’s become.

That’s the part of the story I wanted on the shelf.

Everything else builds around that idea: sickly green damask wallpaper for a Victorian drawing room gone to rot, a hand-drawn gold frame to represent beauty and vanity, and a restrained color palette where the only real color comes from the red of his tie and the blood. I then layered in distressed textures to make the cover feel less like a design and more like an object that’s been hanging in that house for far too long.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is one of my favorite books of all time, so this was an especially fun project to bring to life.