For this exercise, I was tasked with something that I was quite apprehensive of - creating a children's book cover. I have always thought that creating illustrations for children's book appears to be very simple. In that simplicity, I believe, lies complexity. To make something look easy is, actually, quite hard.
The book's title was Animals from Around the World, a book aimed at 7-11 year-olds. I first did research by visiting book stores, trying to get a sense of different styles and approaches to conveying information. My son is six, and also has books appropriate for the lower end of the age group, so I looked at his collection too to get as broad a selection of styles as I could.
In looking at the books, I tried to notice commonalities and also things that I found appealing from a style point of view.
All of the books use colour extensively. There seems to be three broad groups where palettes are concerned: Light and bright, limited/muted and saturated bold. The saturated bold covers seem to use a lot of flat shapes which give a modern feel. Baby's First Bank Heist and "You're Called What?!" fall into the bold category, but they use a painterly style to add texture and tone. I really like how The Grotlyn and The Pigeon Needs a Bath utilise texture. The pigeon story creates almost a collaged approach, so I decided to try something similar out in my sketchbook.
I really like the colour palette and the shape-orientated style of Crazy About Cats. The composition is also great; I really like how everything is layered and I hope to try and capture some of that into some of my future work. I used my sketchbook to experiment with emulating what the references seemed to do so well: to capture the essence of animals, but also to simplify then and / or distort them. It's an amazing balancing act.
The next thing for me to do was to think about some ideas and compositions, so I created these in my workbook sketchbook.
I selected three of the designs, and then building on the successful approach of other exercises, I used Procreate to sketch out a rough and then create coloured visuals.
I included text in the roughs and visuals, but I was not sure how best to communicate size. My thoughts would be to follow the square dimensions of the reference books (26cmx26cm).
My favourite was the last visual, but when I sought feedback from other OCA students (and my son) the overwhelming favourite was the first one. Mainly because it invited adventure and narrative. I have inclination to take my visual to a final render, but for now I have to press on. Hopefully I can find some time to come back to this.
References
Abadía, X. (n.d.). Goliath. Little Gestalten.
Broom, J. and Scott, K. (n.d.). Animalium.
Davey, O. (n.d.). Crazy about cats. Flying Eye Books.
Davies, B. (2018). Grotlyn, the. London: HarperCollins Publishers.
Davies, N. and Scobie, L. (n.d.). The variety of life.
Davies, N. and Sutton, E. (n.d.). Lots.
Gray, K. and Dyson, N. (2018). You're called what?. London: Macmillan Children's Books.
Hoare, B. (n.d.). An Anthology of Intriguing Animals.
Jeffers, O. (n.d.). Here we are.
Negley, K. (n.d.). Tough guys (have feelings too). Flying Eye Books.
Radeva, S. and Darwin, C. (n.d.). On the origin of species.
Unwin, M. and Desmond, J. (n.d.). Migration.
Whalley, J. and Collins, S. (n.d.). Baby's first bank heist.
Willems, M. (n.d.). The pigeon needs a bath!.
Zommer, Y. and Taylor, B. (n.d.). The big book of bugs.
Zommer, Y. and Taylor, B. (n.d.). The big book of bugs.
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