Brian Lutz used a pencil to reveal the life within Paul McCartney for Rolling Stone

Eyes closed, head bowed, hands folded beneath his chin in a gesture somewhere between thought and prayer, this is Paul McCartney as illustrated by Brian Lutz for the Rolling Stone review of his new album. His dark winter coat opens onto the landscape of a Liverpool boyhood, pressed flat like the pages of a scrapbook. The concept reads in a second, but it keeps getting better, like a favorite record growing on you with every rotation. This is an image about what it feels like to carry your whole life inside you.

Low at the center of him, his forearms meeting in a peak above it, like the roof of a little house, a front door stands ajar, painted with the number 20. Ivy has grown thick around the frame as if the house has been waiting a long time. This is 20 Forthlin Road, the house in Liverpool where McCartney grew up and where he and John Lennon wrote some of their first songs.

The Boys of Dungeon Lane is McCartney’s most openly autobiographical record, a set of songs about his Liverpool boyhood, his parents, and his early friendship with Harrison and Lennon. The man is built from the people and places he is singing about. It is a portrait that asks to be read, like lyrics.

The palette carries the autumnal feeling of the album. McCartney’s body is the brown and cream of an old photograph. The sky behind him is a vivid, hand-painted blue. Memory is sepia, the present is in color. The body itself stays flat and collage-like, while the world to either side of him opens into deep perspective, the difference between a memory and a place. The light is rationed with the edges falling away into shadow, while four soft pools of light glow out of the dark, each framing a single memory. They read like lit windows in a dark house, the few moments a life keeps coming back to.

A Blackwing ambassador, Lutz draws in graphite on paper, then scans his work to compose and color digitally. “I love making a mess with traditional materials,” he told Communication Arts and parts of that mess are left within the design. The clouds are smudged, the coat and ground behind his folded hands are roughed in with quick, gestural marks like memories coming in and out of focus. Against all of it, the face and the hands are rendered tight and clean as the most finished passages in the picture. Lutz uses contrast to his advantage. The looseness makes the details look tighter. The darkness makes the light look brighter. And the result is warm and handmade, a genuine feeling for a record this personal.

This portrait lands within a long tradition. Rolling Stone has commissioned original art for its album review column since the 1970s. Over the decades, the section has been a showcase for the best illustrators alive, from Ralph Steadman to Anita Kunz. C.F. Payne, who directed the University of Hartford MFA program where Lutz studied, and where Lutz now teaches, is among the artists whose work has appeared in the magazine. Much of its reputation was built across the fourteen years Fred Woodward ran the art department. The McCartney assignment was directed by Rolling Stone art director Toby Fox along with creative director Joseph Hutchinson, a recipient of the Society of Illustrators’ Richard Gangel Award, given to art directors who champion illustration.

The way it was made suits what it is about. McCartney made this record looking back over a long life, mostly on his own. Lutz answered in kind with graphite and patience, one artist at a desk, building a whole world out of small remembered things.