Exercise: Making a mockup

For this exercise I chose a book that I have just finished reading. From reading the book and the back cover. The title of the book does not necessarily reflect the book’s content in a literal way, as what the characters are actually chasing is the Northern lights, as opposed to stars. This is a story of a mum and her two daughters who take a campervan and go travelling in Europe. Because of the title. I felt like stars needed to be incorporated into the cover of the book. However, from the storyline I would have chosen to draw one of the scenes and places travelled in the story, or else the Northern lights had this had not been the case. I imagine that the stars, the characters and the campervan were the brief for the book cover. As well as the age and hair colour of the characters.

I decided to draw my version of the cover based on the characters in the book and the way that I had imagined them as I had read it. Although I was not happy on a technical level with my drawing, once I had placed the text and created the mock-up. I did feel that it made a convincing book cover. I decided to create my mock-up in Adobe Photoshop and used a mockup template from Adobe Stock images. I am not sure how to add the cover so that it works correctly as a mock-up, but did the best I could and positioned it so that it did the job well enough. I decided not to print it as a mock up as my printer would not be capable of making it look realistic enough.

I used darker colours on the cover to show that it was night-time. I had originally planned to paint a soft light from the van over the characters. However, due to redrawing the van, due to a technical issue with the prospective, it did not end up being in the right position for this. However, now that the image is completed. I do wish that I had re-drawn the van in the original position I wanted, as the way the characters were positioned was more interesting and generally worked better overall. I feel like in my final image, the scene is a bit fragmented and there is too much distance and not enough interaction with the characters and the environment.

I am quite happy with the outcome of this exercise, as part of the obstacle was to just have this completed and to have made something out of my illustration. Quite often I will critique my work as a simple image, however, now that I have had the experience of using my image for a purpose, I feel slightly less critical. When I critique other artists work. I am not as harsh as I am with myself and although I do not feel that my work is not where I want it to be yet technically, I can see that it is also not as bad as I think or at the very least, it can work.