Wind In The Willows final

I have been busy creating my cover for Wind In The Willows today.

I have used tissue paper, water colour paints and fine liners to create my characters. 

The tissue paper for the clothing, water colours for the fur and skin and then fine liner pen to finish them off, all put together in the style of a collage on photoshop: 

Rat

Mole

Badger

Weasel 1

Weasel 2

Weasel 3

Toad

I think Rat and Toad have worked the best as I can see the layers fit together the best and I think they have a lot more character than the other animals. 

Here is my lino print for the background, as this is only my second proper lino cut I think it has turned out very messy and I'm not please with it at all but as always I am running out of time and cannot print again..

And this is my final piece:

I am not very pleased with this, I think the animals look good on their own but all put together I think looks messy and the background and foreground don't work well together. 

As I didn't like this background I thought I would try creating one on Photoshop I'm still not very happy as I wanted the handmade look for this book cover but this one is neater. 

After looking at these for a while I have realized it may be that the 'green' I have used for my print is very dirty and murky looking so I have tried to adjust the colours and brightness on Photoshop I think this is the best it is going to get! 

Brave New World

I have been playing around with the text and images of my Brave New World images. I think these have worked quite well:


But with these fonts:

Penguin Design Award 2013

I have chosen to create a design for the Penguin Design Award 2013, Puffin Children's Prize. 

This year they have asked for cover designs for the classic book Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.

Initially I have collected a few previous book covers: 

This is the template for the book cover we have to follow:

And here are winners from the past 3 years: 

2012 - Tim Parker

2011 - Niklas Sagebiel

2010 - Jurate Laugalyte

And a couple of my initial drawings: 

LinocutBoy workshop

Nick Morley aka Linocut Boy came to college to give us 3rd years a workshop in lino cutting and printing.

Nick Morley is an artist and illustrator based in Margate. 

I had a great couple of days and used Nick's vast knowledge of printing and lino cutting to create an illustration based on a nursery rhyme (I chose the Owl and the Pussycat). 

Here is a link to one of LinocutBoy's videos showing how he creates his prints: 

Deep Sea Diver by LinocutBoy

And his website:
LinocutBoy

Dodo with a Yoyo by Nick Morley

Bikeboy Autumn  by Nick Morley

My Lino design of The Owl and the Pussycat:

My Lino test piece, this helped me to practice with texture's and printing for my final piece:

And these are a few of my prints: