Project 4: Shape and Color

***I was sick during the mid-critique session so I am mainly basing critique off of Suzanne’s critique

Introduction:

In Project 4, we are assigned to create a series of book covers that with the main focus on shapes and colors. We are not permitted to use photography, but are allowed other mediums of illustrations such as typography and hand drawings. We can use up to 4 colors not including white and black. The book covers must also be the same height and width, also the thickness of the book may vary.

I want make a book series for Lolita. Lolita is a critically acclaimed transcribed auto-biography depicting an older man’s pedophilic love for a girl named Dolores, aka. Lolita. There are two other men in the story who also love Lolita but for other reasons — one loves her for perverse reasons such as child pornography while the other loves Lolita for who she is and her personality. I want to create a book for each perspective of the men and have the book cover represent how their views on Lolita differed from one another, yet keeping a similar theme.

More tangibly, I will create three different books that are narratives of each of the men who liked Lolita at different times. I want to keep a single, unified theme for the books that minimally show the different ways these men liked Lolita. I want the color schemes of each book to also reflect the personality of the man and also his relationship with Lolita.

1. Humbert Humbert — was Lolita’s first lover. His pedophilic love for Lolita was largely grounded in his infatuation for younger girls and her body shape. It was a sexual relationship, but nothing of the sort compared to Clare Quilty’s relationship, which was during Lolita’s teenage sexually active years. As such, I want to depict a visual that is mildly promiscuous but also a little bit wholesome.
2. Clare Quilty — was Lolita’s second lover. Clare’s nickname for Lolita was Dolores, which will be the title of his narrative. Clare Quilty was highly intellectual, and a connoisseur of child pornography. His nymphic love for child pornography is what drove his relationship with Dolores - he wanted to film their sex to publish. Dolores was going through her sexual teenage years, so her relationship with Clare was highly sexual, which I want to depict in the book cover.
3. Dick Schiller — was Lolita’s last lover. Dick’s nickname for Lolita was Dolly, which will be the title of his narrative. Dick married Dolly when she was older, and liked her because of her personality and knew little of her scandalous past. Dick wanted to raise a family with Dolly, and eventually move out to Alaska where they can lead a quiet, peaceful life. I want to depict a wholesome side to Dolly that is representative to both Dick’s personality and also his relationship with Dolly.

My initial sketches tried to reflect the different aspects of these three men’s relationships. One idea that I leaned towards was having the main graphic for each book be a part of Lolita’s face that represented their relationship. Humbert’s book would have the lips of Lolita to represent a borderline sexual but mostly infatuated state of mind with Lolita. Clare’s book would have the tongue to represent a more sexual relationship. Dick’s book would have the eyes to embody a love that is based on personality and beauty rather than sex and adrenaline. Another similar idea was to depict different parts of Lolita’s body instead of parts of her face. Humbert’s book would be the torso of Lolita. Clare’s book would be the legs of Lolita. Dick would have the back of the head.

I decided to go with the body idea because I felt that it more clearly represented the different concepts for the books. I also felt that only having parts of the face would be too minimal of a design. For the coloring style, I decided to use watercolor strokes to complement the minimal style and to also convey an acceptance of pedophilia, a controversial theme in the book. I wanted to use a color scheme that is consistent throughout all of the books, but also have divergences to reflect the differences in the various relationships.

This was my first digital draft without the colors for Clare’s book. I used a ruler to measure out the books that I had to create different art boards for the different covers (front and back) and the spine. In retrospect, I should have just made one art board that encompasses all of it.

I wanted to have an art style that was artsy, kind of like the type of art you would see at a hipster art museum. A line based drawing that is disconnected with exaggerated features. In this case, the woman’s legs would be incredibly skinny with protruding kneecaps. I added a piece of underwear into the sketch because it added to the concept that Clare was sexually active with Dolores.

I added some colors to the background that I planned to keep consistent with all of the other books. At this point, I was thinking about having differently colored skin for different colors because it was mentioned in the book that she got tanner as she got older and, quite naturally, also more wrinkly. I decided against the concept and decided to have the same skin tone for all the book covers to keep a more uniform concept. I was not a fan of the font and played around with different fonts. I wanted the fonts to capture the personality, lifestyle, and philosophies of the different characters. Because Clare Quilty was highly intellectual, I looked for a cursive handwritten font.

Ultimately, I decided to go with Palace Script because I thought it looked the most natural while still conveying intellect.

I felt like I was going on the right path with this book cover. I created my own brush strokes by rasterizing high quality png brush strokes I found online into transparent art brushes to be later used. I played around with different textures for the background to create more depth to better complement the minimal theme of the book series. I ended up using a tan color with illustrator’s texturizer with high rough grains.

At first, the skin tone was far too orange, but with Suzanne’s help I realized I could play around with opacity to achieve the effect that I wanted. After showing this idea to a couple of classmates, I was told to play around with the placement of the words. I was also advised by Suzanne to be more consistent with my font throughout the book series. With this in mind, I decided to have a universal font for the title of the book and the text on the back, but have different fonts for the authors. The font would be Lolita’s font as a child, so I used a handwritten 5 year of old font to be the main font for the cover titles, spine, and the back text.

I decided to go with this word placement because it had the best reading hierarchy. At this point, I wanted to change the color scheme to make it more thematic with the different books in the series. For Humbert’s book, I wanted to have a cooler color scheme (cool blue) to reflect both the earlier age of Lolita and also the rather calm relationship they experienced. For Clare, I wanted a more vibrant red to declare the amount of adrenaline and sexual tension that existed between Lolita and Clare. For Dick, I wanted to have a green color scheme to depict the turning point in Lolita’s life from a scandalous past towards a pure and restorative path with Dick Schiller.

Thus, I came up with the second book in the series, Dolly by Dick Schiller.

I wanted to create an effect such that the girl looks like a prairie girl skipping around in the farm sides. I gave her blonde hair and shaded her dress the same blue as the rest of the book series. Dick Schiller’s font is slightly different from the Lolita font - its more childish to represent his naivety and personality.

For Humbert Humbert’s Lolita, I chose to use the back of the torso of Lolita, as to be a midway point between Dick’s wholesome theme and Clare’s slanderous theme. For the back covers, I wanted to create a summary of the book with pictures rather than words to stay in the minimalist theme. This was my first draft for Clare Quilty’s Dolores:

In this book cover, I used Clare Quilty’s Palace handwritten cursive font for a brief summary of the book while using the underwear and broken beer bottles to represent the type of relationship that they had.

I showed this idea to Suzanne, who suggested that the idea may be too different from the front of the book cover. I decided to change my idea and instead illustrate the front of the body. I thought this would be an ironic concept because intuitively the front of the body should be on the front cover and the back of the body on the back cover. This would parallel the controversy that this book brought in the literary discussion.

So for the back cover, I put the front of the legs to stay in theme with the back of the legs on the front cover. I increased the stroke size of the red brush to extend onto the spine and back cover as to have a more seamless and continual design. For the spine, I wanted a minimal vibe with just the background of the covers and a splash of color from the watercolor brush stroke I applied this similar concept to the other two back book covers:

At this point, I liked the direction I was heading and was missing text from the back of the book cover. I decided to choose a quote from each of the author’s about their perception of Lolita.

These were the three quotes I decided on choosing to represent the three different male narrators.

These were the final versions of my book covers. I made the spines minimal to fit the same theme as the covers. One last touch that I did last minute was to change the dimensions of the book cover and by extension, the dimensions of my art boards. I thought my original book cover was too bulky, and I wanted a book cover that was more petite and thinner because I thought it fit in theme with the content of the book series better.

Final Reflection:

This was the first project that required a strong enough theme that had sufficient content to span across three different book covers. As such, coming up with the original idea was a tough task. Luckily, I had read Lolita over summer and I thought it was the perfect book to create a 3 book series on given the three different male lovers for the same girl. Something else that I learned about this project was experimenting with different textures in Illustrator. I played around with different textures to create different brushes and also used the effects tab to create a textured background for the book cover. One important caveat about this is how much different these textures look digitally versus how they look online. In the future, I think I will print out my drafts at more increments to see how the digital versions translate into physical versions.