What A Carve Up! - Ink

Here's the ink work for my What A Carve Up! design. The basic premise of the book is that the murder mystery series 'What A Carve Up!' begins to play out in real life. I have tried to capture this in the VHS by including six shot revolver cylinders and a bloody dagger on the VHS label. The design is more simplistic than my usual book covers, but i thought this would help spice up my portfolio by adding a wider range of design styles. On the back page I have included an Air plane, and integral part of the story and managed to connect it to the entire image by joining the smoke plume and VHS film/tape.

What A Carve Up! - New Project!

As previously mentioned I'm now starting the Penguin Adult's prize for What A Carve Up! as always I began with a thumbnail sketch, however this time i had multiple ideas that i couldn't decide between, so mapped a bunch out to help me decide.

Mapping out quick thumbnail sketches like this really helps give you an idea of the composition, one of the most important factors is weather or not your design would actually work as a book cover, and which ones work better.
I liked both the top left and bottom right designs, but eventually decided on the bottom right design as it's a bit of a break from my usual double page spread 'scene' designs. The initial Ink work will be up soon.

Buckle Tongue - Shirt Designs

Quick break from the norm, you may remember I posted not too long ago about some shirt designs I had been working on for Buckle Tongue. I'm pleased to say these designs have since been printed and are available to purchase right here!

The Outsiders - Final Artwork

The Outsiders book cover has reached completion, and I'm really happy with the final result. I decided to stick with a simplistic font for all of the text, including the title. Taking the Bright orange directly from the flames to highlight the important parts, i think this colour scheme has worked out really well, and the simple text takes nothing away from the image whilst remaining clean and professional.

As I mentioned at the very start of this project, there are currently two competitions over at Penguin, the second one being a book cover competition for 'What a Carve Up!' Which i will be starting shortly.

The Outsiders - Colour

Here's the coloured version of The Outsiders artwork. I decided to go with a black/gray colour palette and keep any bright colours to just the flames and the highlights. This really helps intensify the flames and gives them a real power over the image. Being able to add such sharply contrasting highlights to the trees also gives the great effect, Iv'e really tried show the sheer heat and light coming from the fire as best as I can. The smoke I kept very simplistic as to not take anything away from the image, at the same time it will act as a nice border to fit the Author name into.

The Outsiders Ink

Finally finished inking up The Outsiders cover, you can see the drastic difference this stage makes from the original thumbnail, but hopefully it's also clear to see how much that first sketch helps with this process.

From here I'll go on to colour the image and Then I can begin to add the text. The inking process is probably the part that takes the longest, and it's also the most important, any mistakes made here are carried right through to the final product.

New Project! The Outsiders Book Cover

Alright, It's time for a brand new project! I've decided to move away from the Music industry for a bit by heading back to book covers. Gig posters/ Apparel and book covers are two of my favourite things to illustrate and as such are what I am attempting to build my portfolio around.

I am going to begin by taking part in the first of Penguins book cover competitions, the Puffins Children's prize for 'The Outsiders' by S. E. Hinton.

I'll kick this project off by showing you my first basic thumbnail sketch for the design, you'll be able to compare this to the final Ink in the coming days just as soon as it's finished.

This is the VERY early stage of the design, basically just a guide for me so I know where to place my inks, the basic premise is down and alive in my head, these thumbnail sketches help me to get an idea of composition, ensure it works, and give me a rough idea of where to ink. this is a major step in getting a professional looking cover. Jumping right in without making sure your composition works can sometimes leave you disappointed with your results.

Check out the Penguin Competition here!

Rock The Dock - Ticket design

Just a quick update to the Rock the Dock stuff, I've also been commissioned to produce a Ticket design, this was the design i sent off for primary approval, since they knew about the poster design already, and had asked for a similar design on the ticket, I went ahead and got the colouring done first to save time.

Rock The Dock Poster

So I have a commission! I'll be producing the promotional posters for a small Government funded music festival in Ellesmere port. Due to the nature of commissions it's difficult to post this project in stages, so I'll be posting it all in one go just as soon as I can make it public.

So lets start with the first sketch. Initially i was told to make an 'edgy' rock poster for a Rock festival. Since there was an evident water/dock feel i decided to go with a Shark as the central image. Each stage of this post will be the progress my poster was at each time ti was sent for approval.

The first sketch passed it's approval, which i was really pleased with as I was enjoying the design, so at this stage i began to ink my design and work it up properly.
This is approval stage two, the ink work. At this point you're really seeing the whole design, the only stages after this are colouring and finalising the design. I was pretty happy with this design though, it came out really nice.

Again I was fortunate enough to pass approval for this stage of the design, and so my next job was to move onto colour, and also add in any of the info that I was given my the client.
After adding the colour the design really came to life, the blues and greens worked especially well together, i felt this was a good stage to add in some of the information i'd been given, unfortunately this had been updated since i'd first been given the job, meaning there was more to fit on that i'd first believed during the design process. However I'd managed to make the best of the space, and sent the image off for approval.

Sadly this time it wasn't all good news, the board loved the design but just not the shark (my favourite part!) so after three stages of approval, the shark was sadly removed.

So this is the poster, now without the shark, but finalised with the requested logos etc. as much as I liked the shark, it did free up a lot of space for information by removing it, so the poster was slightly re-jigged to accommodate for this.

There is only one stage left after this, which is getting the poster ready for print. Essentially I'll just be removing the watermark and upscaling the image before sending it to the client.