Bookjacket Brief Part Two – Final Blog

Finally, I have completed an entire brief from start to finish. As I said in Part One, this has probably been my most successful brief, I hope. It was relatively straightforward and full of experimenting and workshops, which I found enjoyable.

After the 3D workshop I was in the hub with Dave Kelly, getting ready to do the digital workshop, only to find out I already knew everything I needed to do to get on with it.

Using the very basics of Photoshop we were to create a 2-colour and black-line overlay print of the book cover.

I can’t stress how easy this part of the project was, I literally finished it in a matter of hours. Whether that’s a good thing or not, I don’t know.

I’d learned a lot about drawing in Photoshop from my Mabinogi project, and so I drew up a very bold black-line image of the front cover of my Bookjacket, using the pen tool. Then it was simply a matter of filling it in with different colours to see what worked.

The great thing about Photoshop is the hue/saturation option, which allows me to change any colour at will, allowing me to see what colours look nice where. This is the tool that made my job so easy, as I was able to mock up some designs in about an hour. Here are some, but not all, of the designs and colour combinations I came up with.




I was very partial to the neon pink/orange/yellow/black combination I came up with, and decided that those were the final colours I would use in the finished piece.

The fortnight afterwards I was doing on the Traditional Media workshop with Sue Thornton. After looking through some of the watercolour and acrylics work I’d brought in she gave me some tips and advised me that working in acrylics would be rewarding, but challenging. I heeded this advice, but decided I wanted to try and work with that medium nevertheless (see Tie Die post).

Finally, the Printmaking workshop with John Archer. I have been doing printmaking for over a year now, and although I enjoy doing it, I’m nowhere near perfect. After a disastrous start and a few mishaps I was sorry to only come out with three prints of any real tidiness. However, I managed to stick to my colour combination as you can see. It appears to work in most mediums!




And a few experiments and painful hours later, here is the finished piece in acrylics (and a watercolour pink).