Book Cover - Idea Development

Development:

Used paper cutting as my technique for trying out an idea for a cover. This one is more of an alternative cover, more to find out how capable my paper cutting skills were at after not trying the technique for a while.

The first castle design (figure 1)  made with the paper cutting was originally for the fairy tale collection book. Once the decision was made for the cover to just be for the Snow Queen story the castle needed to change as the aesthetic of it did not fit the theme. To rectify this the castle was redesigned, with an extra layer to add depth and icicles were added. the same tree front was used as forests feature in the story and created a nice boarder around the main image, as seen in figure 3.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3 

 The text in figure 2 and 3 would also work better if it was in the empty space surrounding the trees as it is currently an appealing format as the book currently is for an alternative cover that is more aimed as a collectible. 

The paper cut cover scene in figures 1-3 were inspiration to design a crown in which a snow queen (Rebakah who kindly modeled for me on these test shots to show the idea) would wear a crown, that had layers inside it to create an extra dimension, as if to express the amount of book pages and short stories that made up The Snow Queen story (snow queen is made up of 7 short stories)

Above is the first book cover made. It didn't have the correct appeal, it lacked enough thought and consideration for the audience had been forgotten. Went back and looked through the photographs of the paper crown again to pick out some different ones which I could use.

Instead of trying to fix this cover I moved on and started on a fresh canvas.

This cover was made to be all white to try and resemble the icy cold harshness of the snow queen. Tired out different options on the curves option bar. Screenshot above was preferred because of the frozen look the blue colour gives off. The shadow makes it appear spooky and unsettled.

Attempted embossing paper. I had never done this before using the printing press at the Market Hall, needed help to turn the handle to run it through though as my elbow was too weak.

On the book cover I would like to have snowflakes embossed or made shiny, so they aren't a part of the image you look at but if the book is picked up and looked at the different lighting makes it more obvious.

 Wrote out some fonts that I found appealing for the cover. This took up a lot of time though and this method of choosing a font for the book was dismissed as there is limited time.