Tuesday, August 12, 2008

a draft and some sketches

finally! i feel like i haven't posted anything in aaaaaages! probably because i really haven't.

when i went to the beach, i did a couple of sketches:


i had fun with them. in particular, i enjoyed drawing the little ship model that i'd purchased. i love itty bitty ships.

and finally! a final draft of my book cover design!
nothing too exciting, but i'm pleased with it, despite having changed direction a couple of times. i'm not 100% set on the color, but i do like it. we'll see. any suggestions? font edits?

book jacket design
--{view large}--

5 comments:

Jim said...

Great Great and great. The boat is my favorite, but you knew that. I like how you used the design on the book cover. Very elegant.

I'd like to see what it looks like to have the drawing of the building to be a shade or tint of the purple. It would either look really good, or really bad...

Sara Wood said...

i don't know where you went, jim (or did i go somewhere? asldkfjs; comcast...), but i've finished the draft with your suggestion, and i quite like it:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2337/2756204262_75542ef9e5_b.jpg

Jim said...

hmm...yeah i like it too. It's hard to choose which i like better though. Your call.

Travis said...

Sara these are cute cute cute
how big are the sketches?

I like your Mansfield Park design a lot—the purple and white is unique as far as book jacket design goes, and the creeping vines are elegant and eerie. The only thing that strikes me is how abruptly the vines end. Because the lines are so thin and close together, they can very quickly begin to read as a single block of texture, and the intricacy is a little lost. Maybe if you had thicker vines at the corners that then became smaller and sparser... or maybe even fill the image with vines, and use their negative space to build the title and bylines. I think right now, the contrast between the vines and the background is so much that the subtleties of value in the title and house illustration sort of become merged with the tones of the background.
Your linework is wonderful though, and that illustration of the house is beautiful—I love the way you've rendered the windows especially.

Sara Wood said...

travis! -yes!-

i can absolutely see all of the things that you've mentioned, and i'm now imagining all of the various ways in which it can be improved. i think that the edits you've specified would really help in transforming this into something that i might even want to include in my portfolio. i'll tackle it again when i've got the time. :)

(oh, and the sketches are not terribly large...they were done in a 5"x7" sketchbook.)