Critique | Changes

Today I showed my work off to my classmates in order to get some feedback about possible improvements to be made. They were impressed with my work and complimented me on my typography choices and art style. 

Below is a list of improvements I have been suggested to work on for my book cover:

• Add roots
• Move both the title and blurb infront of the trees
• Darken foreground/background to create perspective
• Add more snow
• Rear cover needs footprints
• Book title on spine
• Authors name etc on front cover
• Create darkness at the end of the tree line

And here's the list that needs sorting on the poster:

• Capitalisation of "out now!"
• Change font
• Add snow at the top
• Add footprints

Photoshop | Poster Design

This evening I decided to continue working on my project and move onto getting the poster design up and running. Surprisingly after sitting down for a few hours I've come up with something I'm really happy with; this never usually happens. I decided to incorporate both the front and back cover onto my poster, and use some elements from my front cover to advertise the book itself. 

Having a large image of Mole gives someone, who's merely passing by a poster, something to grab their attention. And after all this is the exact job of the poster. I made a pair of fake 3d books using some simple techniques in Photoshop CS5, with these being the main focus of the poster it was essential they looks really top notch. 

I began by pulling in the front and back cover from Illustrator as a smart object. I soon realised these weren't editable and so I had to right click on the layers in the layer palette and convert them into raster layers (pixels). I then went to Edit - Transform - Perspective. This allowed me to add some perspective to each of the covers to begin my fake 3d style. I then made up two oblong shapes to act as the pages, and again I transformed them using the perspective function. After that I recoloured the oblongs with a dull sandy tone which I thought was a great match for a real book page. To finish these off I added some black lines from top to bottom on the oblong shapes to act as page lines using the line tool, and then finally some shadowing using the brush tool on a 0% hardness setting to create some contrast between the books and to add depth.

After that I added a large image of Mole in, and i also imported the snow pattern I created in Illustrator. Mole is the  lower centre piece to balance out the large text found at the top of the poster. I chose to use a serif font for the text as I found this most suitable for the crisp design I'd produced so far. I also think it is the most in keeping font style for the books themes. Finally I finished off by adding the authors name along with my name at the very bottom of the poster as I think its important to inclue both the designer and authors names and it helps to again balance the text on the top of the poster. Anyway, enough talking, here's the almost finished product, although I know there will be a big list after crit tomorrow. 

Illustrator | Book Cover MK1

Here's my design so far. Notable changes to be made before handing in are:

• Add tree roots
• Red eyes for stoats and foxes 
• Consider shadowing the floor
• Mole's footprints
• Add missing text elements from the front cover

But apart from that I'm really happy with how things have come along, it's just lacking the evil themes that I really wanted to highlight through the cover. 

Illustrator | Back cover

I utilised most of the elements from the front cover in order to make the back one, but by tweaking them slightly I've tried to create a different view on things.

I wanted it to seem as if you were looking at the front cover, but from the opposing point of view; out of the forest instead of in. In order to do this I thought I'd change the direction in which Mole's clothes are being blown by the wind, shrink him down to a correct scale for the perspective of the image and change the colour of the foreground to appear darker as if you were standing in the forest. Here's an image of what it looks like so far. The branches still need sorting out so that they don't cover up the blurb but you get a fairly good idea of what I'm aiming for.

Illustrator | Title Text

I have decided to continue with the font I chose in the first part of my font research; Mardian_Demo.

I found this font on dafont.com through the calligraphy category and it is now one my favourite fonts. I think it really suits this book cover design because of its hard serif style that so well compliments the other evil features, but then the swooping artistic lines of the type face add an element of class which is also featured in the book. 

After typing the title out I then had to work around the spacial restrictions of the cover. After some moving around I decided to have the title broken up into 3 parts as can be seen below. I really like the way I've positioned the text to look as if its behind the trees in perspective because it gives a great feeling of depth of the cover. To finish the title off I added a rectangle behind it so it had something to contrast against. I again went for a cold stone colour for it to continue the cold feel. 

Title Text

Below I've inserted a screenshot of the progression so far. I'm really happy with it after adding a few more trees in the background to give them some weight and I've started adding snow onto the branches because I feel they don't blend in very well at the moment. 

Progression

Illustrator | Trees

I started with the upper parts of my scenery today, creating the trees. They are the pinnacle of my book cover and its scary themes so I planned to have them completely bare as I always think trees with no leafs look much more intimidating, and they also had to fit in with the wintery theme. 

I used a bitmap image to trace around some of the branches of an actual tree as practise, and then I imported them into my book cover and began drawing the rest of the tree. To do this I used the pen tool as it allows for great accuracy. 

Once these outlines were finished I made replicas of them and mirrored them so I had two rows of trees to line the path Mole eventually would have to walk down. I then resized them in order to add a sense of perspective that would drag the readers eye into the middle of the cover where the title would eventually be seated.

Outlines

To me the trees definitely felt like they had something missing, so I started making a new brush with a bark style texture on it. Again this was inspired by David Petersens work but I put my own spin on it by making knots in the trees as I added more and more of the texture to the tree. 

Tree Texture

Textured rows

Illustrator | Snow

I began making the scenery for my book cover today, adding in the snow for Mole to be standing on was my first step. I decided to add a snowy texture onto the floor because it gives a sense of realism, and something for Mole to be positioned upon. Without this he looks as if he's just floating in mid air, and it also mean't I could add extra details such as foot prints, just like I've been inspired by in David Petersens work. 

To start with I created a scatter brush, and to do this I had to make some shapes using the shape tools in Illustrator. I decided to go with making 4 circular shapes all filled with cold colours. I chose 2 different shades of blue and grey to fill them with as I thought these would give enough contrast, but not stand out too much from anything else. I think it gives a great snowy texture like you get in reality, whilst still being in keeping with my art style.

Below is an image of the brush, the scatter brush options dialog box showing my customised settings, and finally at the bottom an image of Mole and the snow covered ground in front of him. 

To create the footprints in the snow I used a the brush tool with a fairly rough edged brush option. I then drew out a circle and resized it to match what I think should be the size of Mole's footprint. I think to improve these I could have added a very slightly darker shade of grey in the middle to act as a shadow, but apart from that I'm very happy with them so far.