The Book Cover Club - Murakami

Hey there everyone.

I'm still trucking along on Coco & Oscar sketches, thumbnails, and preliminary book dummy, but in the meantime, I took on a few additional projects. (Do I smell a freelance job? Maaaybe! But I shall save that project for another day.) Today I wanted to share another book cover.

This month, Nowness.com hosted a competition for Murakami inspired artwork in honor of the release of his latest title, 1Q84. The Book Cover Club saw this as an excellent opportunity. Alas I missed the deadline, so my piece is not on the Nowness. It is, however, posted on the Book Cover Club blog. But do head over and check out all of the fab submissions (especially those by the inimitable Ryan Hartley, Philip Cheaney, Kristy Caldwell, and Jess Worby) and cast your vote.

In the meantime, here's a look at my cover for Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicles.

The Book Cover Club

Hallooo everyone,

Recently, a few friends from SVA started a new blog, The Book Cover Club. The premise - read a book, design a cover. In short, awesome. After I saw the first three posts, I knew that I wanted to get involved. So for the fourth book, the Club chose "The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann. (For cliff notes.)

I've never designed a book cover before, so I took a stab. Not my favorite piece, but it was a good experience. I knew that I wanted something dark and moody - which hardly describes my usual work - so I decided to experiment a little with the medium. I actually rendered the art by entirely coating a piece of foam core with dark watercolor. Then using a paintbrush loaded with water, I began to slowly remove bits of the paint off of the board. It's a subtractive process, rather than additive, and allows you to start with a really dark background and get progressively lighter.

I'm okay with the final product; I like the overall image and the texture, but there are things I would reconsider, especially the type treatment (thanks ESup). It was my first attempt at a book cover, I'm glad I did it, and I will definitely try another. My cover is below, but you should absolutely click on over to the Book Cover blog and check out the amazing things the other SVA kids created.