Faux-Fiction cover with a vintage woman portrait in blue, pink and yellow collage and large white title

A small introduction

The books that never were

I began experimenting with digital collage after taking part in a Digital Artist Summit. What might happen if I took beautiful portraits from centuries past and gave them entirely new stories?

I introduced my own colours, drawings, patterns and writing. Sometimes even my dog, Bibi, found her way into the composition.

As the images developed, I began imagining them as covers for books that didn't exist. Classical beauty met contemporary language, including the vocabulary of technology.

Every fictional author needs a name. Liberty is the English meaning of Slobodanka; Basil is a playful adaptation of my maiden name, Vasiljkovich.

The books were never written. But their covers acquired lives of their own.

The first transformation

Five unwritten books

Imagine the stories. I only made their covers.

Androgynous suited figure in an electric-blue collage with yellow eye and title The Button Affair

Historic seated woman with pink and blue collage accents and title The Cache

Historical portrait with pink type and coloured computer code

Woman in period dress layered with bright colour, circular motifs, writing and title Algorithm

Suit-wearing figure against a historic Montenegro street with vivid yellow title The Missing Man

A peek beneath the surface

Every artwork has its secrets.

Here is what Algorithm is wearing underneath.

Original woman portrait used as the source for Algorithm, without markup strokes

Procreate screen showing Algorithm on the canvas and a long stack of individual layers

The second transformation

And then they left the books.

The imagined covers became artworks. I began imagining the rooms in which they might live.

The Button Affair framed in a moody black and white Parisian interior

The Cache artwork hanging in a bright contemporary interior

The Hidden Syntax hanging in a futuristic minimalist room

Algorithm artwork hanging above a writer’s desk and typewriter

The Missing Man framed above a mid-century sideboard and orange lamp

Faux-Fiction

A life of their own

Perhaps a book doesn't need a story to begin one.

These figures began in other times and other images, passed through my digital sketchbook and emerged as fictional publications. Now, even their rooms are imagined.

And still I wonder where they might go next.

Faux-Fiction is part of the group exhibition PixelARTed: 5 — Contained / Unleashed, featuring Bobby Graham and four other artists.
The Front, Canberra · 4 December 2026 – 6 January 2027.

The five Faux-Fiction artworks are my own digital collages. I brought together historical portraits and photographs with my drawings, colours, patterns, lettering and other visual material to create these new compositions. The imagined rooms were generated with AI to explore how the artworks might live beyond their fictional book covers. The cover of this onphone is an AI-assisted adaptation of my collage imagery.