Don't judge a book by its cover
Client project: Forget Me Not by Sophie Pavelle - Bloomsbury Publishing
A really fun publishing project that I worked on in 2021/22 with the team at Bloomsbury Nature, and the debut author Sophie Pavelle. Together we created black and white sketch style illustrations for each chapter and a full cover jacket design with illustrations.
The 10 chapters in total were each about a different native species to the U.K, where to find them and crucially, how to protect them going forward so that we preserve them and make sure they can thrive into the coming years ahead. Marvellous eh?
Not only that, they are species not typical of what we would think of as native - something I personally really enjoyed. Not only from a creative perspective - don’t get me wrong I love a Robin as much as the next, but I have drawn quite a few - but from an informative perspective too. I have such a thirst for learning despite me being way from any kind of education for over 10 years now. I really enjoyed researching each of these species for this book.
The chapter illustrations were only going to be printed in black and white, so creating drawings that still have movement, a sense of being drawn on location and capturing the true characteristics of each species was really important. When I was constructing each illustration, ideas were initially thought-out amongst us all to make sure we had captured what Sophie had seen, their natural habitats and if appropriate, each species personalities.
When I was drawing each scene, I wanted to add a lot of soft textures and a strong sense of line. Charcoal pencils, pale grey brush pens and graphite pencils worked really well for this as well as adding the occasional white highlights in Posca pens. Sometimes, a sharp line or a strong highlight/lowlight was needed to enhance markings and shapes.
I don’t often work solely in black and white so it was a nice challenge to make me think away from my normal and safe way of creating images. When you take colour away, the illustrations are almost stripped bear, so you have to really consider the lines you’re making, why you want to make them that way and how they will affect the overall image. Who needs brain training - phew!
With the book cover, the idea of using that unmissable ‘forget-me-not-blue’ was a key idea early on. A few ideas and compositions were tried and worked through, until we decided on what species should make the front cover. We went for species that were dynamic - like the hare jumping and the salmon leaping from the water; as well as making sure size and species variety was key. We didn’t want them all to be birds for example, otherwise it would come across that the book was about bird species when that isn’t the case at all. Similarly, we also didn’t want to include all 10 species on the cover, there had to be a few that were left as a surprise for the reader.
I have worked on quite a few book jacket designs over the years, and almost always when working through ideas and compositions it is the simple ideas that often get pushed through to the final artworks.
The phrase, ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’, is often used so widely and has so many other applications than being solely about book jackets. But so much time, effort and design consideration goes into them I feel like you almost should really. I can guarantee at some point you have walked into a bookshop and a cover has caught your eye. For whatever reason that may be, it has made itself known to you in amongst all of the other hundreds of books on the shelves. I think that’s pretty cool.
So, when you’re next in a book shop - take a look and judge them! What do you think makes a great cover? What is it about it that caught your eye?
To see the illustrations in more detail, both the chapter drawings and the book jacket illustrations, head here to my website and find the project in my portfolio.
If you have enjoyed seeing one of my client projects and how I worked through it, do let me know. I have plenty of past projects I can show, and I always find it really interesting to see how other creatives work.
Until next week,
