Judge A Book By It's Cover

Finished book cover

I chose two books initially being the indecisive person I am, one was "London: Punk to Blair" and the other "Native American Myths". I settled on Native American Myths, I thought the imagery would be really interesting, and after doing a pretty heavy editorial about loneliness I didn't think I could face drawing bloody Tony Blair.

This is the original cover - super super boring considering how rich and exciting the topic is. I was wary of ending up going down the stereotypical imagery route, so thought that a better way of showing the theme was through the colours, typical earthy tones would hopefully make it noticeably Native American.

This was my favourite rough I was planning on developing this idea into the final design, but the crit helped change my mind.

-too literal 

-cliche imagery?

-not ambiguous 

Instead decided to take this forward. Good decision

- ambigious, mysteriou - fits with "myths"

-intriguing

-abstract shapes is a nice step away from literal imagery

-good colours

I got weirdly into drawing hills. Practiced them using gouache for a playbook takeaway task. Obviously very un-Native American colour scheme but I'm having a love affair with gouache at the moment. Looks so much smoother and crisper than the acrylic in my roughs. Splashed out on a couple of tubes of earthy colours of gouache to make mixing my colour palette easier.

Settled on gouache painting sheets and then cutting the rock shapes out of them. In the end it paid off, but oh my days it took hours and hours.

STRENGTHS:

- working with colour in this brief - finding a colour scheme that works and sticking with it

- craft, I'm proud of the time and effort put into the final piece 

- concept, not taking cliche imagery, finding a more ambiguous way of tackling the subject matter

- I really enjoyed the collage and gouache route

WORK ON:

- time management: I completely underestimated the time this final cover would take

-making things easier for myself : I think I made this process way more complicated than it needed to be but I was tired n my brain obviously wasn't helping me out:

My stupidly long-winded process of creating the rolling hills including, painting sheets of different coloured gouache, drawing a template of hill shapes on tracing paper, cutting each individual hill shape out of tracing paper, transferring this to a piece of the coloured gouache, cutting it out, attempting to fit all these gouache pieces together. NOPE.

- scruffiness? When I get more confident with Photoshop it could be interesting to polish it up digitally.