FMP (BA): Book Cover Sketches & Final Sketch

After gaining some feedback I was really motivated to do my book cover design, and as I was flicking back through my previous sketches I realised that they have become really structured and 'stiff'. Therefore I went back even further to look at the designs just before I reached this stiff appearance, and found one of my sketches where the words were flowing around the page. 

That together with one of my inspirations, the Ely poster, I began to start sketching again and this time just improve on this 'flow'. I really liked how the designer connected the words and let some of the swirls overlap them. These swirls have a very strong Art-Nouveau appearance as they are heavily detailed and there is more focus on the illustration than on the type.

One of my old sketches:

Sketches & Development

I had the idea that quills will be floating around the type and towards the book like words floating off of the page. There was going to be a mixture of flow and structure, so I kept in mind that I wanted my type to remain in a set boundary. I too want the illustration to be dominant but not so much that the type disappears behind it.

At first I was going to display all of the information on the same page but, once again, after looking at how I did the DPS design for Moby Dick I decided to feature my name and "FTWeekend" on the back cover. 

FMP (BA): The Raven DPS

I have decided to do this project separate from my other DPS designs that I had done so far as my process was a bit chaotic; I couldn't make my mind up about this design and kept going backwards and forwards, that even I am confused with what I did sometimes.

The Raven

For my Edgar Allan Poe piece I only really had one decorative font on there, so there was a possibly of either going with the same font or produce another one. I therefore produced four versions: the one that's already been done; two script styles in different thicknesses; and one sans serif with the same width and height as the sans serif I had drawn for my book cover.

I practised with my dip pen on the bottom of the page but it didn't really carry that thick-thin stroke effect I was looking for, so instead I just went with what I already had done with micron.

I scanned all of my versions in to have a closer look at what I had, and from this I picked out the advantages and disadvantages of each one.

FMP (BA): Book Cover - Design Process

The Final Sketch

With all of my elements ready - the layout sketch and type - I could now work on my final sketch. I'm hoping that by planning ahead that this process would be a lot easier, and I jotted down the measurements of my type on a spare piece of paper to help me out a little in terms of composition.

Getting the dimensions right was a priority because I want to make sure that everything is aligned, and this proved a lot trickier than I thought it would for the curved lines. I managed to tackle this problem by laying everything out as straight lines. Each line had to be the same width as the type I had prepared before so I used the line in the middle that I had drawn previously as the centre point for my lines. I then drew around the edge of the plate, making sure that it matched up to those straight lines. I had to do this several times but I got there in the end. 

Once all of the guidelines were drawn I put in some more guidelines for each individual letter which also took a while to do. Fortunately my dimensions were correct so I didn't have to change anything at all. 

Then I started to draw out my characters and went from top to bottom so that I didn't smudge anything.
I used a 08 micron for the top line, 03 for "of" and "FTWeekend", and both 02 and 03 for "Quotes as well as the book illustration. The other illustrations were done in 01 and 02. All in all, I used a lot of micron pens!

FMP (BA): The Raven

The Final Outcome

The Process

Drawing the Type

I wanted to be as accurate on the type as possible so I measured the width of the whole quote that I had done yesterday and halved it. This would then be the centre point of each section, for example, "Quoth the Raven" measured to 16.2cm so I halved it to get 8.1cm. I measured the centre of the paper I was working on and drew a faint line, as this line would serve as the centre point of all of the quotes. I then measured the points I had earlier according to this line so that all of the quote will sit central on the page. This is quite confusing to explain so hopefully the image below will help out a little bit. 

Now I can work on the type and I focused on the first section first (Quoth the Raven) because this one will be sitting on a straight line. I took reference from my sketches in terms of kerning and character width, and once the guidelines were done I was able to draw each letter.

To retain accuracy I made sure that the thickness of the letters were the same and used a ruler to make sure the lines were straight. This will help me out a lot later on when it comes to inking. 

FMP (BA): "You Are You..." Contin

The Final Piece

The Process

I wanted to develop this design because even though I'm going to be selecting a few of the most appropriate ones for the festival I just know that this design was "me". I've started to find my own voice with this and because I enjoyed doing it so much... Well, why not include it?

I brought the design back up in Illustrator to tweak the design slightly according to the annotations I made (which you can see here in a previous post).