Bees and Botanicals for Book Cover
Bees play a critical role in our ecosystem and I’ve been fascinated by them since I was young – I often think about taking a bee keeping course. I was therefore excited to design a book cover on the subject.
The brief required a ‘modern art nouveau feel’ and in answer to this I designed the main composition with bee friendly plants. The stems, leaves and flower-heads form a lattice that follows underlying grid to organise the organic shapes. The patterns forms a nest to house the title and long subtitle.
Sketch progression. Initial sketches and the refined sketch with the underlying grid peeking through.
The various plants were chosen for their attractiveness to honey bees. They are; Sun Flower, Beach Rose (Rosa rugosa), White Clover, Lavender and Lupine.
As with most all of my illustrative work, the palette is constrained to a limited number of colours. The honey coloured background was chosen to emphasis the subject matter.
Some of the plant detail isolated from the Illustrator file
