Painting in the style of Gipi - watercolour

In this task we were told to draw a couple of images in our sketchbooks using biro. This was to make use more careful when drawing but also showed that we should be more confident and just draw on the page in confident strokes. I then added colour to the drawings with water colour, this was the first time I had used water colour so it was fun to experiment and for my first time using them I was pleased with the results.

Book Cover Scamps

To expand our knowledge of book covers and gain inspiration for our own we were told to recreate 12 book covers. I firstly sketched out the book covers and went over them in fine liner so that they would be good clear images when I scanned them in to edit in Photoshop.

I then transferred the images into Photoshop and removed all the white so I was left with the black outlines of the book covers. I did this by altering the levels to pure black and white and using the magic wand tool to remove the excess white.

I then began to colour the scamps using the fill tool and looking at the book covers I was recreating so to get the colours right. Here is a few screenshots of my work in progress, up close in Photoshop.

These are my final pieces of the book cover recreations. overall i was happy with the results as they were vibrant and represented the books very well. It also increased my knowledge of the elements needed on a book cover, gave me inspiration for a theme and developed my Photoshop skills.

Proposition

Once we had picked a theme we were asked to create a proposition for our book cover. This covered the themes of the book, names, key scenes, a summary and iconography. A proposition for our book made us think in detail what we wanted our book to be about and who the target audience was, so to establish a clear aim and target for our final piece.

Pinterest For Inspiration

Below are screenshots of a website called Pinterest. Pinterest allows you to search for a subject E.g. dresses, and will bring up a range of pictures and 'boards' associated with that subject. Here on my personal page I have separate boards filled with pictures. I have a 'Book Cover', 'Disney' and a 'Gardening' all to help inspire with my book cover design.

Book Cover Spidey Diagram

The set brief of our book cover was to base a book around the elements fire, water, air and earth. We then created a spider diagram for each of the elements so to get an idea of what was related to it and gain a rough idea of a book we could do on it. I chose a gardening book for earth, The Little Mermaid for water, a book on dragons for fire, and UP for air.