Exercise: Making a mock-up

For this exercise I was asked to create a mock-up book cover based on an existing illustration I had already done or by doing a new one. I decided to go back to the portrait of my detective from the previous exercise ‘Choosing content‘ as I wanted to keep refining the portrait and really turn it into a cover. The original is below.

I first went back to all my sketchbooks and the final design and explored how I wanted to modify it. I had had a hard time deciding on which colours to take on the last time and this time wanted to try a bigger yellow highlight to represent the sun coming in the window as per the abstract from the book we were given to base the illustration on. I decided I also wanted try to be even more dynamic with the marks and try to make it even darker and more shadowy. The bottom right two images in the below previous trials were the main basis for this.

I then did some further trials to build on this and see how I could have the best combination of what I was aiming for. I decided to make the lights and shadows sharper and more dynamic and less soft as I had done in the original.

I then tried out some thumbnails to explore layout and where the text could go. The covers I saw online for this did not at all match the style of my drawing so I decided to do my own style and played around with the yellow, grey and black colours I wanted to use – inspired by the previous mood board and research.

Then I recreated the illustration in my preferred colours with a different paper colour background that was slightly warmer to match better with the introduction of the yellow. I tried to make the shadows more dynamic and darker eyes to give more atmosphere. It turned out as per the below:

I also searched for some typefaces to try to find a font that suited a crime novel style and also from the 1940s and finally settled on ‘American Captain’ from dafont.com.

I then brought it all into InDesign to start created some mock ups and based on the trials and playing around inside InDesign, I created the below six potential mock ups:

I believe the best approach is the last one on the bottom right. As I played around and zoomed in and out of the image and moved the text around, I felt like this one had the right balance of colour, text and a little bit of space. The main title is in white and the first text you read but the author’s name is still bold enough to also catch but differentiated in black. Here is the final result!

I tried to look up the publisher to also add this information but it seems on Amazon that it comes from an open library called Chivers with no specific website or logo that I could find.

Final reflections:

I really enjoyed being able to go back and refine an existing piece. The fact that I had time to explore other things, learn more and take space away from this then go back to it also was really useful to then bring new energy into an improved version of it for this mock up. I realise that sometimes I actually do this when I get a bit stuck with an idea or illustration, when I feel less inspired or struggle to get a good idea that I like, I often go to something else for the course or take space by having a break and coming back the next day. Clearly this is a process that works for me.

Being able to play around online and zoom in and out and move the character around was also really useful to get to the final mock-up. I realise I often centre my illustrations and am not used to taking more perspective or trying to go off page or overlap text so this was a good exercise to experiment more there and really try to think from a graphic design sense.

I also really enjoyed working with the portrait although I had to make this person up base on mood boards and pictures of detectives which I thought would be harder than using an existing photo. However, this actually let me then define the features more in line with the tone and mood I wanted to convey and to try to really build a grimace and intense look to match the suspenseful crime novel!

References:

These can be found in the log for the original illustration exercise here https://wordpress.com/post/joirvine.home.blog/539