Illustration 1: Key steps in illustration- Part 4: Style-Exercise 3: A children’s book cover
You are asked to produce a cover illustration for a natural history book for children (age 7–11) entitled Animals from Around the World. The image is to be used as a full colour front jacket to encourage children to choose this book from the library shelf.
There is a long history of covers for children’s reference books and styles have changed over the years; however people have become used to ‘reading’ the imagery used and have expectations of what such a cover will look like. Think about a modern audience and how you can attract children to the contents.
Draw up at least three ideas as coloured client visuals. Include information on the final the size and format, and where the type will be positioned.
When researching childrens (7-11) illustrators I came across Ed Young. His work isn’t necessarily specified to that age group but the collage method and use of textures is something I would like to reference when creating my book cover.
I looked into various styles of illustration, for this task I wanted to focus on drawing as I have done less of this method. I sketched out some initial ideas, later going onto producing some more in detail thumbnails.
Considering the idea of the audience ‘reading’ the visuals themselves as well as the title I chose thumbnails that incorporated the title into the illustration, or that were obvious with their imagery what the contents of the book would be about. This is very important as the book is for children, so the more obvious as opposed to metaphorical, the better in this case.
With the more simple/obvious being better in mind I moved forwards with my idea from thumbnail 1 of the animals on a white background, collaged between leaves and other animals from around the world. Focusing on each continent I tried to sketch an animal from each, moving onto water colouring them, then using a fine line pen going over loosely in black. I wanted the illustrations to be colourful and fun, choosing brighter shades of each colour as opposed to something more accurate/muted, in hopes that this will be more appealing to children.
I experimented various arrangements of the illustrations, some linear and some more ‘random’ coming to a medium ground, I tried to distribute the colours evenly and have the animals intertwined with the title. The animals were aimed to be ‘going around’ the text, either in front or behind. I added a few light paper textures as I didn’t want to take away from the hand illustrations. The typeface used is Gotham, a contemporary, clear typeface which is easily legible.
Looking back, the style of book may be appear to be made for a too younger audience and not for 7-11. Perhaps the use of a character or inclusion of a more engaging element would of worked as opposed to just the bright coloured animals. I feel as if my initial thoughts on being simple was probably less affective for the age range than something more complex/interesting.
