For my Final Major Project during my Art Foundation I re-designed the existing book jacket for Cormac McCarthy’s novel ‘The Road’ as well as creating a small number of key interior illustrations that highlight important key moments within the novel. Below are some of the developmental pieces as well as the finals.
Once I had started working from my reference images I played around with a few colouring techniques in Illustrator so see which captured the mood of the novel the most.
The above examples are a few mock-ups I generated in Photoshop to get a rough idea of the layout I wanted to use for the book jacket design.
One gun. Two Bullets. Two characters. One for each? I took that concept and came up with the illustration above and it was originally to be used as the front cover but seemed more crime than drama.
This is the scene in the novel where the son is held at knife point and his father uses one of the two bullets available to save his son. I felt that the best way to show this was to make a sequential piece to show the actions.
As well as being an interior piece, I used this illustration for my front cover.
The three hanging bodies that were in the barn that the father and son stumbled upon. I wanted to create a very dark atmosphere by using heavy black ink, only revealing the silhouettes of the figures.
Final mock-up
