Rolling out all the book covers tonight...

These are the progressing solutions for our other current book cover project, designing a cover for James and the Giant Peach. There's still several tweaks I need to do to these but overall I'm happy enough as I got to draw a rhino and I like drawing animals. I just used the airbrush on Illustrator to colour both rhinos as I wanted a transparent effect. Ditto for the clouds the rhino on the back cover is emerging from.

So far so..okay

So this is the book cover I'm currently slaving over. To be honest, I'm not sure how much I like the idea at the moment; I've been having really bad creative block the past couple of weeks. Maybe I'll warm to it more when I draw out the type that I'm using on the front cover. I can't decide between playful or decorative script. Guess I'll just have to try both.

James and the Giant Peach

These are just preliminary ideas for our other current book cover design brief for the Puffin Design Awards. The title we have to design for is 'James and the Giant Peach'. I knew I wanted to include some sort of illustration in the cover so I picked the focal character of the Rhino in the story and drew up two designs. I'm thinking of going with a white background for the coever itself to keep it simple. Not entirely sure yet though.

Various Solutions

Just some playing with typefaces/type placement. It's really baffling me what to do with the type right now.

Digital tests

Photographed colour ink blots, live traced/shopped a little to look decent digitally. Just playing around with placement. Don't know whether to go for symmetry or not. Hmmmmmmmmmm. Also drew out the brain with the Pen Tool in Illustrator, gave it an ink brush effect for good measure. There's very little you can't do on a computer these days.

My Own Tests

These are my first attempts at ink blotting. Excuse the poor picture quality, my decent camera is currently on the fritz. I want to incorporate ink blotting but in order to acheive my desired effect (a black ink blot that recognisably resembles the human brain) I think I'm going to have to draw an 'inkblot' manually on Illustrator then just superimpose it on some of the colour hand rendered blots. Best get cracking I guess.

Rorschach Test Research

These are all examples of ink blots used in Rorschach testing, and are pretty similar to what I'm thinking of doing. That said; I'd like to make my ink blot look as much like a top down view of a human brain as possible. The colour ones are very interesting, I hadn't thought about incorporating colour.

Jacket Idea Research

So I finally had a brainwave after weeks of designer's block about what I want to do for my 'Musicophilia' dust jacket cover. Considering psychology (especially psychoanalysis) is actually an interest of mine, I'm leaning more toward using recognized psychological imagery for my dust jacket than basing it on music. My idea is to use the infamous Rorschach test,(the ink blots test in actual English) as the main image on my front and back cover. I will make an ink blot and photograph it then add playful type around it's edges in order to fulfil what was asked of me in the brief. More Rorschach research to come.

Type as a graphic element

I thought I'd just put up some more of my research into type as a graphic element as it's part of the criteria for our dust jacket design brief. These are various examples (a lot of which are playful and illustrative) of typography being used as a graphic tool.

More Pop Cultural Referencing Crap

These are just some recent illustrations I've done, thought I might aswell throw them up to show you guys. Neither were originally intended to be used as college work but I ended up using my personal take on 'Gramsci', the communist alsatian from the show 'Spaced' as a poster for a project in my Ideas Generation class.

Chimera in a bag version 2.0

 

Did the first part of the chimera project out again as I wasn't too impressed with my other 'final' piece. It's another landscape, except this time more surrealistic. I'm calling it a 'dreamscape'. Done in both Photoshop and Illustrator. I chose to do another landscape piece due to the extremely limiting items I had on my person at the start of this project. In my 'dreamscape' I have used a silf scarf to form the mountains, a lip gloss applicator for the birds and a tub of Vaseline for the moon. The clouds in the background of the sky I painted on myself aswell as the wings on my 'birds'.

Oliver Sacks Book Covers

 

 

These are all past dust jacket designs for the book we have to design for, 'Musicophilia' by Oliver Sacks. To be honest I'm not a major fan of any of them bar the playful nod to surrealism in the illustration of a hat and the french text 'Ceci est ma femme' for the book 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat'.