The brief:
Produce 3 illustrations for a series of travel guide book jackets. The guides are for the cities Istanbul, Helsinki and Milan. The illustrations need to be diagrammatic and the type needs to be hand-drawn.
I started by doing some visual research. I tried to encompass travel guides, maps, and other diagrammatic representations:
I also created a mindmap to explore the different possible foci I could take this brief down. This was a useful first step to help constrain my focus but give myself concrete avenues to keep in my head when I explored the identities of the cities. So I then moved to research the cities themselves!
In conducting the research I used my A3 sketchpad to create a composite moodboard / sketches / research page, where I could refine my thoughts and ideas as well as accumulate references. You can see in the pictures below the progression; not every page has the same kind of content in it. Some of the pages I was exploring layout options, and then later I had 80% decided that trying to take a unconventional path would be interesting. I wanted to explore the food culture of each of the cities, but instead of a recipe book, I wanted my travel guide to be all the best places, to eat all the best food the cities are known for.
It made me thought of the illustrations featured in the TV programme The Great British Bake-Off, so I thought it would also be a good idea to do some research into Tom Hovey [1-3] the illustrator behind them.
Now I had a hold on the topic I wanted to focus on, I thought it best to revisit potential compositions before I got to the visuals stage.
I really liked the style of Tom Hovey's illustrations, and that line & wash effect seemed really interesting to me. So initially my thumbnails had that kind of render in mind. But as I explored that a little more, I decided to explore some other options too. None of the thumbnails absolutely captured what I wanted to do. I liked the top-down aspect of the Food Collage option, but I also wanted a kind of collage feeling. I also thought about how I could try and tie the books together as a series. When I see a Lonely Planet guide, it's identifiable, regardless of the city or country. I also remembered that this needed to be a book jacket, not just a cover, so I decided to go with a common composition, that I would work out how best to do the jacket aspect when I could play with the roughs to visuals process. I started with Istanbul, and when I progressed to the right composition, I copied the baseline for Milan and Helsinki.
In doing the first colour visual, I incorporated the country flag into the design. This seemed to work really well and helped me identify a background colour. I carried this over into the other two as well. I decided to move the Helsinki visual into the final artwork. I experimented with the watercolour approach, but it didn't seem to work very well. I started playing with a more oil-painterly approach and it seemed to start working, so I went with it. I also couldn't resist getting some texture and pattern involved, so I swapped the plain white plate from the visual with a wooden board.
I also thought the background was too plain, so I created a background pattern by creating the outline of the city's shape (great for Helsinki which is made of islands) and then repeated that shape at different sizes.
I completed most of the work, and used some printed type for the blurb and labels. In reflection I should have hand-drawn the labels. I needed to get a nice effect for the title, so I did some experimentation:
I then incorporated the title text by hand, and worked out how best to make the spine stand out.
The last thing to do was to check how the cover might work using a mockup:
I am pretty pleased with the result. The painterly thing work quite well, and I still incorporated some patterns into it, which is an approach I had experimented with in my sketchbook. I would like to be able to get the illustration a little crisper with finer highlights.
I would still like to explore a softer watercolour style to the work. The overall effect is quite bold, and probably wouldn't appeal to, say, seasoned or elderly travellers. I wonder if by taking a more measured approach to the work, and then marrying that with some more formal serif text, it would appeal to a different set of people?
Hovey, T. (2019). The Great British Bake Off Illustrations — Tom Hovey / Illustrator. [online] Tom Hovey / Illustrator. Available at: http://www.tomhovey.co.uk/the-great-british-bake-off [Accessed 24 Jun. 2019].
Story, G. (2019). Great British Bake Off Illustrator Tom Hovey Reveals His Scrumptious Success Story. [online] Cass Art. Available at: https://www.cassart.co.uk/blog/tom_hovey_great_british_bake_off.htm [Accessed 24 Jun. 2019].
Lecture In Progress. (2019). Meet Great British Bake Off illustrator Tom Hovey. [online] Available at: https://lectureinprogress.com/journal/tom-hovey [Accessed 24 Jun. 2019].
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