I’m excited to show you another new project I completed in the studio this week – a book cover design concept!

Uppercase Magazine is getting ready to release the second edition of their Surface Pattern Design Guide. They teamed up with Make Art That Sells for a special assignment: create the book cover!

They’ll take a look at all of the entries and pick their favorite to use as the actual cover of the book. Extra bonus? Winning artist gets paid.

It’s like a Project Runway book cover design assignment up in here.

Make it work!

My plan of attack on illustration projects is always preliminary concept work, and book covers are no different. I spend a good chunk of hours doing a few things to mentally wrap my mind around what I need to create.

1. Pinterest reference: I scour the site for visual inspiration to pull from. In this case, since the project has a specific client – Uppercase Magazine – I spent time looking at the sorts of art they’ve used in the past. The point here isn’t to copy; it’s not to recreate something that’s already been done. Looking at tons of art reference and specifically what the client is drawn to helps make sure your results aren’t too far off in left field.
2. Thumbnail sketches. Once I hit that point, I’ll start trying to work out my ideas on paper. I’ll think about layout, space, how everything will fit together. Sometimes this goes hand in hand with step 3.
3. Play around. I skipped thumbnails for this particular project (I don’t always do that). I knew I wanted to do some really great hand lettering for this book cover, and sometimes trying to quickly sketch that out as a thumbnail isn’t as productive as actually breaking out the paints and creating the fonts you need.

Here’s where my watercolor paints took me this week:

And then as I started scanning my paintings in, I discovered an awesome texture I had made months ago and never used. That day, I had been playing with painting the same square over and over, covering the entire page. I did it with a mostly dry brush, with a little blue and a little green on it.

It was a cool texture that wasn’t too overpowering – I wanted the book title to really be front and center.

The main “Surface Pattern” text started as just plain bold blocky letters. As I worked all of my design elements together, I started experimenting with using masks in Photoshop to start cutting out different little patterns from each letter.

I’m not sure which letter style is my favorite, but I’m kind of really in love with the giraffe R with his long neck coming around. Not gonna lie. I’m going to do an animal alphabet someday and it’s gonna be glorious.

What do you think of this book cover design concept?

Don’t forget – if you’ve got your own book project going on, I wanna work with you, too! Click here to contact me.