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Recreating book covers for design practice. This process is important for the book cover project as it has me focusing entirely on the composition and design rather than the imagery.

All photos made from copyright free images.

Text content: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.co.uk/work-with-us/design-award/adult-fiction-cover-award/

A quick look at what other Animal Farm covers have looked like. The common denominator here is the use of a pig as the main design, which is something I want to avoid. However I may use the pigs as an object to practice my drawing.

Source: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=animal+farm+book+covers&rlz=1C1CHBF_en-GBGB774GB774&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiGgpTth4_ZAhXMDMAKHWnhCkQQ_AUICigB&biw=1366&bih=613

Student Design Award 2018 - Penguin

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.co.uk/work-with-us/design-award/

My next project will be a book cover design for the adult fiction book, ‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell. I’m excited to practice more with typography and graphic design for this project but also to work within a shorter timeframe, with the deadline being the 6th March.

My book cover for ‘The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes’ by Arthur Conan Doyle for the Folio Society.

I enjoyed experimenting with the graphic style of this brief, and the limited coour palette that was required in the design. The biggest challenge with this was to avoid having Sherlock in the cover but to imply him strongly within the imagery. Here I chose to have the pipe and Victorian stopwatch, additionally with hints to the stories within as the images he is looking at. I am happy with the composition of this piece as it didn’t require any text besides that on the spine.

End of year exhibition, including my illustration piece of 'The Man With The Twisted Lip'.

Designs for the Christmas exhibition illustration. The requirements for this is 14x12, however the measurement unit is open to choice. I'm choosing inches as the size is almost A3, which may be the size of the illustrations I'll do for this project.

My wall space so far.

http://visual-science.com/projects/skull/intaractive-app

Reference for skull drawing. This has been helpful as it is 360 degrees, I can turn the skull and view it from several different angles. The only problem with this is that the lighting is always coming from the front. However it has been a good reference to get the basics scientifically correct.

Pose practice - Hugh Boone on the street

Following my first attempt at portraits I took advice from tutors, went back to basics and drew a skull. From that I traced over with newsprint to create a generic face with the anatomy of the skull, then used that drawing to create the character of Neville St Claire and Hugh Boone.

Neville St Claire:

Travelled, educated in stage play makeup and acting, large villa, married 2 children, popular, lots of friends

Hugh Boone:

Hideous face, professional beggar, a shock of orange hair, pale face disfigured by a horrible scar, outer edge of upper lip, bulldog chin, penetrating dark eyes, crippled, pockets stuffed with pennies

Pose practice - Hugh Boone on the street

Illustration - ‘The Man With The Twisted Lip’

This story is all about deception of identity and discusses a character who is rich and organised, a famiy man, who dresses up as a professional beggar to get extra money. What I like about this story is that St Claire is not a villain, he doesn’t get nasty, he just gets caught out by something and doesn’t mean to hurt anyone in doing so.

The two identities in this story are Hugh Boone, the beggar, and Neville St Claire. A rich family man and a beggar. Two different sides of the class spectrum with naught but a bit of makeup in between.

In these few pages I've been playing with the composition of the possible illustrations of 'A Scandal In Bohemia' by using viewfinders and drawing the image within. It's taught me to pay attention to all aspects of a piece, not just the main focus, and will help me when applying this top the book cover designs and other illustrations.

While looking at the designs of characters I have had to study the sort of clothing and garment ms the higher class of people in the victorian era would have worn. Neville St Claire from 'The Man With The Twisted Lip' and Mr Musgrave from ' the Musgrave Ritual' will benefit mostly from these studies.

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I went to The Royal Armories in Leeds and took note of the victorian police exhibits, and these are the pieces I recreated from that experience. I wanted to play around with how the use of colour affects the cohesion to the object with the viewer. These old, battered objects put with a brightly coloured background modernises them and gives a contemporary feel, yet the coloures of the objects themselves remains traditional. This affected how I had them in a sequence as the first, third and fifth stuck to a black or grey colour scheme, whereas the second and fourth were made of wood.

This odd mixture of modern and traditional with colour and medium is something I want to explore further in the project, when I begin to illustrate the characters.

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Book cover design theories

Rejection Theory - design gets rejected and the illustrator gets a percentage of the comission fee

Absent Present Theory - takes something away, for example ima__ne m_ g_ne

Face Theory - images that look like faces

Ebooks - cover design has to look good as a small jpeg thumbnail, need to consider this in colour choice and composition

Type as Image Theory

Blurb Theory - Designing the whole cover as a whole package including blurb is an influential tool. Consider how books are advertised at waterstones, books on tables and on shelves

Gender Theory - black cover for males, white for females, changing text to suit ‘gender’

Association Theory - using metaphors

Collective Theory - adding other materials to book jacket

Grid Theory

Zoom Theory - zoomed in image

Henry 8th theory - no solid design for character, maybe chop off head to hide character identity, allows room for the audience to imagine the character for themselves

Incopsulate Theory

Molecular Theory - Large image made from smaller images

Negative Space Theory

Content as design theory - eg Frankenstein font made from different fonts

Change Theory - if commissioner wants more changes to charge extra

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