Inside the 250-Page Sketchbook Behind Spider-Man's New Looks
Designer Alessandro Bertolazzi built every "Brand New Day" look from a 250-page hand-painted sketchbook, with painted scars, a Billie Eilish muse and a Scheherazade reference.
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The takeaway
- Bertolazzi designs every film from a 250-page hand-painted sketchbook with key phrases assigned to each character.
- Jon Bernthal's Punisher scars were painted with a skin-illustrator palette in five minutes, with no prosthetics.
- Sadie Sink's Jean Grey look was modeled on Billie Eilish after Emma Chamberlain and Gigi Hadid were considered.
Alessandro Bertolazzi designed the hair and makeup for "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" with a 250-page sketchbook, hand-painted page by page, before a single actor sat in his chair.
The makeup and hair designer fills a book like this for every film he works on. Each page carries painted character studies and key phrases he assigns to every role. He shows pages over Zoom during the interview. His process starts with a one-on-one conversation with each actor, then he brings the vision to his team to execute.
Director Destin Daniel Cretton set one overarching brief for the film: realism. "I don't want to say dirty, but real and grounded," Bertolazzi tells PopSugar. "This was the wish of [Dustin], and I was really happy to do this."
Zendaya worked with her personal makeup artist Kellie Robinson, and Tom Holland had his own grooming team on set. Bertolazzi designed the rest of the cast.
Sadie Sink as Jean Grey
The secrecy around Sadie Sink's character ran so deep that production used code names to keep it airtight; "Jack" stuck most. The conspiracy theories turned out to be true: Sink plays Jean Grey.
This is a pre-X-Men Jean, a young teen still discovering her telepathic and telekinetic powers, set up as a false antagonist and searching New York City for her sister. Sink wears Jean's signature red hair in messy layers with minimal makeup. Bertolazzi briefly considered blond hair for the character but decided against it.
His notes for the look read: New York Girl, Edgy Girl, Cool, Messy, and Dangerous. He auditioned several celebrities as references, including Emma Chamberlain and Gigi Hadid, before landing on Billie Eilish to balance edge with lightness. "Billie for me represented that perfectly," he says.
Jacob Batalon as Ned
Ned, like Zendaya's MJ, is now a post-college graduate living in New York City. Bertolazzi says he was unhappy with Jacob Batalon's wig in the previous film and wanted natural results this time. "I wanted the wig more natural, not stiff and stuck on the head," he says.
The care extended to a scene where Ned's goatee mustache appears briefly on a smartphone screen. Bertolazzi says his team took special care to make even that small detail look realistic.
Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle (The Punisher)
Frank Castle lands in a "spat" with Spider-Man that leaves him thrown out of a moving truck, his face covered in scars.
Bertolazzi painted every scar with a skin-illustrator color palette, no prosthetics. "You spend too much time in makeup with prosthetics [and] it can become boring," he says. "The idea is to keep it all natural, real." The process, he adds, "takes five minutes."
Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova
Florence Pugh's Yelena Belova appears in a cameo, helping Spider-Man track down Jean Grey while dispensing life advice. Most of her scenes take place in a Russian bathhouse, in water or drying off, so Bertolazzi says he did not need to brainstorm a specific look. She wears one distinct product: eyeliner. "I assumed she asked to put green [eyeliner] below the eyes," Bertolazzi says.
The Hand
The ninja-mercenary group The Hand appears draped in red garments and masks. Bertolazzi's notes for them read "Eastern Civilization," "Toward Western Civilization," and "The Mask as Protection of Intimate Space."
One member, Snow, is a female warrior with a long braided ponytail, a winged cat-eye, and a red warrior headband. Bertolazzi wrote a single word for her: "Scheherazade," a reference to the Arabic folktale heroine who delayed her death by telling tales for one thousand and one nights.
Scorpion and Tombstone
Bertolazzi also shaped the smaller roles, including Michael Mando's Scorpion and Marvin Jones III's Tombstone. Jones wears a naturally textured, tapered-cut wig for Tombstone's signature hair. Bertolazzi says keeping each actor's essence mattered while he took artistic liberties.
For Scorpion, he drew on an 18th-century drawing of a real scorpion held at the Royal Academy in London and designed a gold cracked-skin tattoo to signal depth beneath the villainy. "[He] is a bad guy, but not completely," Bertolazzi says. "So I was thinking about showing what your skin looks like cracked open. [The gold] is a light from behind."
The sketchbook method, paired with painted effects that take minutes instead of hours, signals where franchise beauty design is heading: faster, grounded, and built on research before the chair.
Source: PopSugar Beauty; Source: instagram.com
Amara Osei
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Staff writer covering media and advertising at Eurasian Beauty Journal.
