Penguin Book cover project - cont.

After a tutorial with my tutor about this project, it was pointed out to me that this design ( taken from one f my design sheets ) had a lot more impact then the design i had settled on before, i hesitated to pursue this idea because i thought it might be slightly too vulgar, but visually it is a lot less complex and fussy than the illuminated books inspired design.

This is the image i ended up using for the book cover template, i painted the design onto acrylic paper and drew the lettering by hand, i regretted doing this later because i feel the free hand lettering is messy and unappealing, luckily i worked out a way to edit these parts out and overlay the new text on Photoshop .

 I wanted the back of the book to tie in with the front cover so i used to same paint to create a splash of colour and then simply drew a small orange in the bottom right hand corner, i really wanted this design to be simple and understated, but also bold and eye catching, i feel like i did my best with this concept but in retrospect i could have developed it more, perhaps simply drawing the main illustration on the front cover rather than painting might have given it more impact and a crisper line.

Below are variants of my final book cover design, set to the specified template given by penguin, the one i will go with as my final piece is the very last image, i have chosen this one because the actually illustration is cropped better then the others and i also fixed the bad hand-drawn lettering at the bottom of the page, i am pleased with my final design, considering the amount of difficulty i have had trying to narrow down my ideas for this brief. 

YCN Yorkshire Tea project- cont.

Below are my final designs for a possible packaging for Yorkshire tea, i decided to follow the route that i was previously thinking about; creating a few cute animal characters and placing them in a natural, countryside setting. I have chosen to make my designs as simple as possible, so only flat colours with a fairly limited colour palette. 3 of the 4 sides of the box i have designed have animal characters on them, the backside and the bottom of the box are left largely sparse to allow for product information. The top side of the box is the Yorkshire Tea logo surrounded with leafy motif that is present throughout the design. 

Above is a net of my design layout how i plan to assemble the box as a prototype. 

This design that i have created for a final piece of this project, is perhaps not as detailed or developed as i would have liked, but as i have little time to finish it off this simplistic design is about as far as i can go with this idea.   I feel if i want to put my best efforts into the rest of my project work i need to draw a line under this brief. 

I wanted to make something along these lines to begin with, only more polished and executed better, perhaps the final design would have looked more appealing if it were painted traditionally rather than digitally but as time is not on my side, digital was the most efficient way of creating these images. 

Penguin design award 2015

I decided to chose the title Oranges are not the only fruit out of the three selections Penguin had to offer for the competition, which is a novel by Jeanette Winterson about a lesbian girl raised in an adoptive Pentecostal christian family, who struggles between her sexuality and religion.  

I chose this book because the potential if the imagery is a lot stronger than the others on offer, in my opinion anyway. I like idea of exploring the sexuality of the main character while at the same time keeping some traditional religious themes and imagery.  Also as mot of the covers for this title are quite dated i'm interested in making something contemporary looking. 

This is one of my design sheets, at this point is was torn between wanting to draw something innocent and playful or something that was a little darker or more sexual. I looked at some other artists work for inspiration and i was drawn to Matisse and his cut outs, he has a very playful way of portraying the body, so i looked at ways to simplify the female form, again i started out with lino because i wanted to create some strong lines and bold colours. 

Here are my colour variants of the lino cut i scanned in and coloured on Photoshop, i used a gradient to make the colours in the image look more bohemian and psychedelic. I was quite pleased with these designs but still felt i had a lot of other ideas i wanted to explore.   

For my research i also looked at illumined books and bibles, thinking this would tie in well with the novels religious themes, i like the idea of angels and devils, because of the conflict experienced by the main character, i thought the angel and devil could represent Jess and her lover.

This is the final version of this design without text, i am keen to do hand drawn text for this cover, which might also mean painting this design traditionally so the styles and textures match, also i think painting this traditional would add to the idea of it being a page from an illuminated book.  

YCN Yorkshire tea brief

Out of all of the briefs offered for the YCN student awards i was most drawn to the Yorkshire tea brief, which i felt had the most room for design changes as the original packaging illustration is a landscape painting, so i can hopefully take elements from that and add my own influences in. 

I began thinking mainly traditional, using the countryside as the base theme, i thought this might appeal to the current market for Yorkshire tea, adults aged 35+, i also wanted to at least try and make a design using lino, thinking this would add to the traditional feel. 

The thumbnail sketch i decided to go with as a design i would carry over to lino cut. I thought having a small animal in the image would make it more endearing to the audience, although i feel now that i made the design of the owl a little to flat and could use some character. 

Here is the result of 4 layers of lino cut arranged and coloured in Photoshop, i had some trouble trying to make the colours work and tune the opacity of the layers so they wouldn't drown each other out. I also played with the positioning of the Yorkshire tea logo quite a lot, i found it difficult to make the image and the text work together. After i group tutorial i was even more sure that this design is not going anywhere, i enjoyed working with lino and playing with the layers but i don't feel the image out come works in this case. I have re-evaluated my direction with this project and i feel i need to explore other options.  

I still want to make something that is traditional in keeping with my original idea but also i feel like i want to incorporate an element of charm and youthfulness, one of the things said in the Yorkshire tea YCN brief is that they wanted to appeal to a younger audience, so perhaps this is a good opportunity to bring more of my personal work to this project, i am a lot more comfortable drawing characters and things with a little narrative than i am with traditional landscapes. 

So i have designed a few animal characters to continue the project, i feel like this is a smart move after talking with my tutor we both agreed having mascots can greatly boast a products appeals and people will more likely warm to cute endearing characters.

Some digital sketches of my main two character designs, a fox and bunny, who bond together over a cup of tea rather than fighting each other, another suggestion i had was to create a different animal character for each flavor of tea Yorkshire tea have in their range, but i think just designing for the original flavor will be my goal now and perhaps i will think about others if i have time. 

 

These design where made digitally, but i really do want to go back into traditional again, perhaps with inks or watercolour.