Project 4 — Shape & Color
About this Project
For our fourth project, we were assigned to redesign a book trilogy of our choosing. I selected the series The Boxcar Children. Using the typography and layout skills learned in this course combined with my color theory and illustration practice, I created new jackets for my selected books from the series. This assignment is more involved as it required thinking within the content of the selected books individually and as a series but also creating something outside of the expected. It also included working with unifying not only the cover, spine, and back of a single book but each book with the other two in the series.
Project Process
I selected The Boxcar Children series because I read them as a child and the covers for the books always stood out to me as very detailed, realistic and dated. They also always featured the main characters.
The use of children and large typeface immediately suggests it’s a children’s book. I wanted to create covers for this book series that would take it out of the child literature section and create a more universally appealing and ambiguous cover. I also wanted to put less information in the images as to not give away the entirety of the plot like I feel the original covers do.
My first step was to select three books from this 149 book series. I selected the first three that had a type of building as its main focus. I found the slightly vague titles like “The Old Motel Mystery” to be more daunting and eerie than “The Mystery of the Pirate’s Map.” This selection also gave me an easy base to start of off because of its main theme surrounded a building.
My sketches were driven by the environment that would surround a abandoned house in the woods, a lighthouse, and a motel. I saw no other way to do a landscape justice without making it a continuous image across the front, spine, and back of the book. The settings also made the color selection (red, blue, and green )easy but in an effort to make them more daunting, soft on the eye, and easier to create a slight monochrome, I adjusted the value and hue of the colors slightly.
I wanted to continue the very painterly and detailed nature of the original covers by using multiple colors and creating depth and detail. I was also inspired by the artwork created for the Cartoon Network show Steven Universe as it has very detailed and delicate landscapes while still being graphic and clean.
My next steps were creating the line work for the three settings for which I used multiple reference images in order to orchestrate the imagery I wanted. Following that, I used color swatches (Color-Aid paper 2"x3") to help visualize my range of colors for each image.
I used these images and color swatches in an in-progress critique that brought up constructive changes to my plans. One suggestion was to make the skylines/horizon lines of each book on a closer level in order to create a more satisfying open space on the top half. There was also suggestions about adding a small icon/image to the center of each spine similarly to the palm tree on the final book. In this iteration I was more unsure of the placement of the text on the cover and the spine. Suggestions to make the placement consistent between the three books and reposition/redesign the text on the spine really informed my next iteration.
This iteration included text on the back cover that was later removed for appearing like it was floating. In addition to this change, each skyline is nearly equally placed on the page, the text is equally positioned in the top right corner, and each spine has a featured icon and a new designed book title. The dock on the first book would later become a tent in the background.
The next step was coloring and would later become the final image.
Conclusion
This series of illustrations was the most involved and enjoyable assignment so far because I was able to use both my art and design skills. I enjoyed the challenge of creating a trilogy of images that are both very different but also the same. In terms of line work, color, and use of space, I believe the final book jacket was the most successful. I find it to be the most architecturally convincing while also being appropriately stylized. This could be due in part to it being the last one illustraited and colored, allowing me to enhance and eliminate certain elements that worked and failed in the previous two books. If I were to continue this series or re-do these three, I would want to challenge my graphic/realism to new peaks to achieve more depth and range while mainting a very illustrated style.
