Book Cover
For this assignment, we had to illustrate a book cover for an existing book. We could choose out of 3 books, and then design the front, back and spine of the book cover.
Personal Goals
The most important thing for me, was to find a way to integrate my own style into the final design of my book cover. I think this is important to show who you are as an artist, but it was also a way for me to keep this project fun, and it really made me want to work on this project.
Moodboard
As you can see, I started out with figuring out a way to capture the feeling and theme of this book. Then I slowly came up with more ideas, and to make the final design, I searched for inspiration for the flowers.
Sketches
I tried out many different ideas, but they all had the same general concept. The book is about stress and burnouts because of work etc., so you can see returning elements like texts, feeling trapped and really filled and busy illustrations. My feedback was that I also needed to keep the back of the book cover in mind, so I made even more sketches with that tip in mind.
Digital Sketches
I chose this sketch, because it was truest to my style, and I loved the idea of making the silhouette of the person out of texts which represents the stress, and then drawing colorful flowers around the person, representing the peace the person needs to find. I turned the sketch into a digital sketch which I then used for the drawovers.
Drawovers
We had to switch our sketch with another classmate, and then draw over their sketch to show how you would do it, and give them feedback. My feedback of the student was to make the person and the texts on the back more visible, because they kind of blended in in my sketch. It also wasn't clear to her that the texts on the front were supposed to be a silhouette of a person, but that's mainly because my sketch wasn't in color. The contrast between flowers & texts will also be bigger once I made the sketch in color.
Final Sketch
When I chose this sketch as my final idea, the teacher gave me more feedback. He suggested I tried out making it even busier, making the person more obvious, trying out different poses for the silhouette, and using different types of flowers that also overlap. While making a new sketch in color, the teacher suggested to put the title big on the front with the flowers overlapping that too. So I then came up with the idea to remove the silhouette, and just make the flowers really colorful and busy.
I wasn't sure yet if I was gonna keep the dash in between fok-king because it is 1 word cut in 2, but it didn't really make it more difficult to read the words without the dash.
I was experimenting with the colors of the text, to see what would look best. The purple matched with some of the flowers and it was easier to read the texts, but the white was more peaceful and matched the overall aesthetics better.
I was really struggling with the back of the book cover, and figuring out the best way to display the text on the back. I wasn't happy with this yet, but I asked for feedback the next time I saw my teacher.
Looking back at my moodboard, I suddenly had a new idea to integrate the silhouette into my new sketch. The silhouette is a blue overlay, because the color blue really stands for negative emotions and sadness. It contrasts well with the colorful flowers, but I put this idea on the back burner, and continued working on finalising the illustration.
Finalising the illustration
I finished looking up inspiration and put all the pictures in my moodboard, and then decided on the final style I wanted to draw this illustration in. I wanted to keep things simple, because the illustration itself is already busy enough. So with a limited color palette, I drew all the flowers and leaves. I also drew some final small details with white, so it matches the color of the texts a little bit better.
I copy-pasted all the flowers just like in the sketch.
Before I asked for feedback, I experimented some more with the colors of the texts. Instead of purple, I used a dark green, because I thought it matched better with the illustration. But I still wasn't happy with the big square on the back.
I also overlapped the text with the flowers. I absolutely love how that turned out, it makes the illustration even busier and the text doesn't stand out that much, it really brings typography & drawing together as a whole.
The teacher was very positive about the illustration, the only thing I had to focus on was the back. He gave me a few ideas for the text on the back, so I started working those ideas out. I came up with this, and kept it like this because it looks really good, way better than what I previously had. I kept the flowers in the background, because the single color in the background was too boring. This kept things busy, and the text was still readable.
The last step was to put the title and the name of the author on the spine of the book cover. I experimented with that a lot, I wanted to use the same font, but still differentiate the title from the author. So I tested out different sizes, colors and eventually made the name of the author Italic.
End Result
Mockup
Evaluation & Feedback
I am very happy with the end result, and I'm quite proud of it. The first week was difficult, because I wasn't particularly interested in the 3 book options, and I wasn't sure how I was going to intergrate my own style into the final design. I think it's pretty funny how in my first sketch, the flowers were supposed to represent the peace, but later on I turned the flowers into the stress itself. I'm also happy with all the feedback I received, that really helped me shape my sketches into this final design.
The feedback of my teacher was very positive. "Your research is very clear and varied. You chose the right options and colors to bring out the concept of the book, and you ask for help when needed. You can definitely be proud of your end result. The concept of an overgrown garden certainly fits with the content of this book, but goes into a slightly different direction which can make people curious and show the humor of the book."
