This week, feted illustrator and paper engineer Helen Musselwhite joins Rob Ryan and Quentin Blake as the third artist to create a unique Stylist cover.

Starring the Big Bad Wolf, the Wicked Witch from Oz and Snow White’s mean old stepmother, our cover is hardly the stuff of bedtime stories – but then, as Stylist discovered in this week's issue, fairy tales do have a seriously sinister history.

Inspired by this, Helen made a 3D paper model, hiding these story book characters between gothic thorns and brambles. The painstaking process took Helen 50 hours, with each element individually sketched, then traced on to paper, cut with a scalpel and then given a 3D quality using thick card and foam board.

“I assemble it all and take a picture without gluing it down,” Helen explains. “So an unexpected sneeze can be catastrophic!”

How we made our fairy tale cover