Friday 12 November 2010

From a rough to a finished cover

Phew - it's been busy since the last blog! I've been working on a few websites (site design, HTML, JQuery and cartoon Flash animation), cartoon strips, cartoon character designs and book covers. All great stuff!

New clients often ask what the process is to get from an inital brief to a finished piece of art. So I thought I'd blog with an example of a start and end point - in the future I'll do another example with more of the stages in between.

I've been doing a bit of work for a startup company who are producing a series of books called the Definitive Guides. I did a couple of initial covers as an initial commission and they recently contacted me to produce another.

I'd worked with them before so knew more or less what was wanted. They sent over the book title "The Yorkshireman's Definitive Guide to Extravagance".

So here's the initial draft

I usually provide a few ideas, just sketches at this stage - just to get discussions going. In some ways, the rougher the better as that makes it clear to all involved that it's just an initial draft, a starting point to get the ideas flowing.

The client fedback. They liked the more realistic image featuring the traditional thrify Yorkshireman - but how about something to make it more Yorkshire. We settled on the rolling Ilkley Moor and the Ilkley Moor Chip Van and I produced a range of images with different colours for final approval.


And here's a zoom of the main image. The style is supposed to be kind of doodley and loose rather than smooth vector art I often do (see http://www.johnaabbott.com for examples of different styles of cartoon and illustration).

So that's it and looking at that chip van is making me hungry ! Anyone for chips ?






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