Workshop 2 15/11/15

Todays workshop was to create a book cover for a Penguin Classic.
I had a look at other Penguin Classic book covers that have already been created.

The Portable Edgar Allan Poe 2006

Pygmalion 2007

The Purple Cloud 2012

Wuthering Heights 2008

I like how creative the covers are for these books, especially the first three books. They are colourful and eye catching and they would be seen if they were on a book shelf in a shop.
However, the Wuthering Heights book is not colourful and I don't think it is as eye catching as the other book covers. However, the cover does sit well with the theme and story line of the book and it sets the scene for what will happen so I think it has some good qualities that go well with the theme of the book.

We had 11 book titles and synopsis' to choose from. I decided to do a cover for Wuthering Heights and I would like to make the cover more eye catching like the first three examples of Penguin Classic books.

I did some rough drawings and jotted down some key words from the synopsis to work with.

Wuthering Heights is quite a dark tale but mostly it's about a romance. I wanted to demonstrate this using the two hearts joined together and the demonic love of the characters showing through this as well. However, after discussing with my tutor we decided that my drawing was too modern for a 'Penguin Classic'. I needed to take it back to a more Victorian feeling, so I put the character in costume.

 I feel that this works but I need to do a background that fits the image of moorland and also ties in well with the characters.

I created this and darkened all of image on Photoshop. But on reflection I decided that I wanted the hearts to stand out more, so I went back and lightened this part of the image.

Although this has improved the image. I'm still not happy with the final outcome as a whole. I feel I need more experience using Photoshop so that I can make the image sit better with the background. Or do a different kind of background. I don't think they work very well together. I like the effect of the hearts and the detail on them, but I don't think the rest of the image works with the colouring pencil. I think this image needed to have been either  more of a mixed media image or I should have used a different media, maybe an acrylic or watercolour paint.

The feedback I received from the peer review was 'nice shading and spot colour', 'which book is this for?', 'research ways of shading i.e. top hat' and 'wonderful pencil work. I also like how haunting the characters eyes are.'
I think I may have made my idea a bit too modern for a book cover for such an old story, and this is why some people may have not known that the cover was designed for Wuthering Heights. I think if I had drawn in some Moorland and made it more of a traditional design for a Penguin Classic book cover then it would have been easier to recognise.
I would benefit from looking at alternative ways of shading, that kind of research can improve my knowledge of sketching and shading and give me more techniques to work with and make future work better.
The positive comments were very nice to see, it makes aspects of my work feel like it was effective and my ideas like the darkness of the eyes and the spot colour was successful in this piece of work.