Exercise: Judging a book by its cover

For this exercise I had to choose a book by an author I was familiar with and design two book covers for them. I choose Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. Although this is a series of books I decided to combine all of them into one books. For this exercise I really wanted to implement some other medians. I bought some pastels from Amazon to experiment with and I already had copic markers so I could use them as well.

 These were pieces of game of thrones related inspiration I saved, just to help create some themes and get an idea of the direction and elements I wanted to include, at this moment currently there wasn't any specific ideas for covers as I hadn't started sketching.

 I really like the typography on these stranger things book covers and I like how its consistent throughout.

I really like how pastels look and the way artists use them, I think its a really unique art direction and it couples really nicely with a weird and wonderful contexts like this American Phycho book cover. I also like how the cover is largely one big illustration with a black bar. 

I know this is created with water colour and not pastel but I could achieve something similar for the background of a book cover by blending pastels together, I think this is a unique was of creating a very attractive and exciting background whilst also allowing for the book covers to be consistent with each other, I also think coupled with dark colours and eary settings that water colour gives off such a dreary and dark vibe which is perfect for game of thrones. I also saved these variant covers as they feature black letter which are also quite medieval and a good choice of font.

SKETCHING

 I began by noting down my 'things to remember', these included, the audience of game of thrones, things I wanted to include in my cover and what I wanted to achieve with it.

I started making a short list of elements from game of thrones what would be relevant such as dragons and knights. I also thought of how I could capture that, for example my brother has a knights helmet I knew I could photograph.

 I also have the photos I took of Lincoln castle which I could include, (I used these photos inside the magazine exercise). The metaphorical themes of game of thrones and the real world issues they cover inside the show were also things I wanted to include. For example the contrast between the powerful and the poor, and one that idea of contrast I had the idea of creating a flip cover rather like the painting of heaven and hell.

On the top I wanted to have the kings and queens eating food at the table and then underneath the table is dragons destroying castles, but you could flip the cover to have any of the two realities on top. The idea of this cover was that It would show the contrast between life at the top and then life on the battlefield which usually they get others to deal with. However although the begin at the top, when you flip the book round the war and fire is now on top, which shows how quickly the table can turn and how royalty should stop being so naive to issues and face facts.

Another idea I had linking to the previous one was having a table full of food and blood dripping below it, inside the blood drips would be a dragons eyes. This teases the doom that's coming and how  no one is prepared and that the dining halls are going to be filled with blood.

The weapons and shields of game of thrones was another thing I wanted to focus on, I sketched out some differant designs including one of a shield with weapons behind it and another where there is multiple shields in a line, this would be an interesting way of presenting the sigils and colours of each houses.

A big theme of the next season of game of thrones is the upcoming war between the lannisters and Targaryens, the Lannister sigil is a lion and the Targaryens is a dragon, so I thought these two animals would be very relevant and iconic.

On this page I tried again to do a rough sketch of a dragon, however its just too detailed and too much of a task to illustrate it, I thought of a way of getting around that. I wanted to include an illustration of a dragon but as good as possible. I developed on the idea of the dragon eyes being behind blood. These two illustrations on the right hand page began as just eyes and a nose, I was trying to be abstract, however after feedback from my bad they didn't quite resemble what I wanted them to. I added some basic detail to each and outlined the fact a bit. This detail was necessary but still gave the same effect. I wanted to fade out most of the face so they only thing visible would be the eye and a bit of the face, I really feel this worked with the menacing dragon eye. With the lion (Lannister Sigil)

I then took each one into photoshop and created these two book covers.

I started with a blank A4 layer in photoshop and inserted each illustration, I faded a lot of the face out and made the eye the biggest focus, I brightened it up slightly digitally just to enhance it, I also adjusted the colour digitally for the dragon to red which I thought was a lot more effective. There is a each houses banner waving the background just to link the two together further. Going back to the research I did in the beginning I really liked the use of black letter and thought it was really effective. I added some texture and a gradient overlay so it wasn't as flat.

These were the final mock ups of my covers. I created a spine and back cover for them. I tried to make them as consistent in terms of colour, font and imagery.

I then moved onto pastels, to try and use more medians in my design work and I wanted to create another full book cover. For my focus and I chose dragons eggs, 3 dragons eggs where given to Dany in season 1 and they have a very iconic design, they're also pivotal to the story.

These were the 3 dragons eggs that I drew, the paper I was using had a really deep grain which often meant the pigment didn't fully cover everything and there is white patches. I think next time I'm going to get some proper pastel paper.

It was one my first time using pastels, It didn't take me long to get the basics of the technique and I already had some experience with shading and it integrated that with the pastels. I really liked the outcome.

I made multiple different versions of the egg cover. I wanted to try different ways of varying it up. I experimented with Blackletter and other fonts such as Mont which is bolder and a sans serif. I decided on using the mont as the black letter was too similar to my previous work. For the background I used the clone stamp tool to almost make the background look like it was bleeding out, this allowed the eggs to be part of the cover instead of static on the page. On the flip side I then experimented by cutting the illustration off with black boxes much like the Harry Potter book covers.

This was the final cover I went with. I really like how bold the font is, it gives the book a whole different feel and throughs a modern twist on it. I also prefer the horizontal orientation instead of all on one line.

Now I will admit this part of the exercise was slightly rushed as I had spent so much time in my illustrations.

This is the font based cover, I did some rough sketches, I wanted to implement some colour into the covers so they would stand out more.