Project 2-Puffin Book Cover

 

For this project we had a choice to decide between designing a front cover for 'One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest' (Penguin Books) or 'Grimm's Fairy Tales' (Puffin Books). I was instantly drawn to the Brothers Grimm idea due to the darker nature of the fairy tales. After some research on book covers and on the fairy tales I began my idea generation process with scamps. After this, I found I was more drawn to the silhouette ideas, particularly the witch, and the idea with the tall trees to the top right of the scamps.

Next I developed the most promising ideas with more detailed sketches in my sketch book attempting to use more unusual media, such as marker pens, cardboard, biro, felt pens and watercolours.

I also developed some of my ideas on Illustrator in order to get smoother edges and bolder, cleaner colours.

Clearly this method helped to significantly improve the quality of my silhouette idea, giving a much deeper black, far cleaner edges, and a selection of text fonts to choose from. Using the tools Illustrator provides I was able to construct the idea to the left all from scratch, however I felt the chaotic nature of this idea of this idea was quite overwhelming and so produced a disappointing piece.

In the end, I decided to go with the idea of the tall trees with the stalking wolf. This idea was scanned in from my idea development in my sketch book and then developed almost entirely on Illustrator. The pen tool was the most heavily used tool which helped to create all the shapes from the trees and wolf to the title and stars. I used 'Handwriting-Dakota' for the text on the spine and back copy. After the pen tool created the shapes and the pencil and oval tools created the final details, I moved the piece into photoshop where I added a simple gradient which I felt really transformed the look of the idea. As with the previous project, I feel my real weakness lies with a lack of skill in both Illustrator and Photoshop, I feel I will have to seriously begin to practice using these programmes till I am at a point where I feel more comfortable using the more unusual tools, in particular, I would like to be able to add gradients and texture efficiently. I would say my strengths for this project lay in my preparation, I significantly improved how much research I did which lead directly to the ideas I was able to produce.