Evaluation
When I first started this module I first thought
about what fairy tale/comic book hero I was going to choose for my book cover.
I wanted to do something out of the ordinary and
nothing that no one else would do I was thinking of doing the story of Lizzie
Borden, like the rhyme
“Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave
her mother forty whacks. And when she saw what she had done, she gave her
father forty one.”
I thought this would be a really cool idea to do
and I could be very creative with it especially when taking the photographs.
But when I started thinking about the props and
costumes I would need I thought it would be quite difficult getting a hold of
them so I changed my idea and decided to go with Cinderella.
I didn’t want to just stick with the original story
of Cinderella I wanted to modernize it a little, make it more up to date and
real.
Instead of Cinderella wearing a ball gown I thought
about putting the model in a modern dress something a girl would wear to a
club. As I thought that Cinderella would go to “the ball” this was a special
event at a club she really wanted to go to but her nasty stepmother wouldn’t
allow and makes her stay home and clean the house while her step sisters can do
whatever they want.
For the book cover I decided to have a picture of
the shoes that Cinderella wore and for the front a photo of Cinderella looking glamorous
in a nice dress.
Now that I have taken my photographs I have to edit
them on photo shop to put my book cover together.
I started by opening a new document on Photoshop,
I’m quite an amateur when it comes to Photoshop but I managed to find my way
round and got used to it, I don’t know all the buttons and what everything is
and means but I will get there. The Next stage was to set out the book cover,
the inside flaps, the spine and the two covers. When this was done I was all
ready to get started.
I started looking through my photographs I took of
my model for the cover, I chose two which I thought worked the best, I used the
magic wand tool to select the model if there were any rough edges I would use
the refine edge tool to smooth them out. I then cut and pasted them onto my
open document. I did this for the both of them and then I used the free
transform tool to scale them down to size. I played around with this for a bit
to get the perfect size that I wanted.
The next thing I did was to choose the colour of
the background, I decided on black as it’s a colour which I like to use and it
makes everything else stand out. On the text I used an outer glow; to make my
black text stand out on the background otherwise you wouldn’t see it. I used a
fuchsia pink glow to achieve this look. I was deciding on the font for a while
as well because it had to fit the style of the book cover. I went for a font
that flows like handwriting, its contemporary like the “story”. Pink was a
major colour for my book cover, it’s very girly and modern.
My next task was for a background image, because I
only took studio portrait photographs I only had a plain black background, I
found some images on Google which were perfect for me to use, I needed a
photograph of a block of high rise flats and a picture of the inside of a club.
These were just generic photographs, I decided to stick the two images together
as you can see on my book cover worked better this way as my images of my model
was in the middle of the front cover , I thought this made it look quite
interesting and suited the idea I was going for.
On the back cover I didn’t want too much on it, I
didn’t want to make it look too complex so all I put on there was a photograph
of “Cinderella’s” shoes I took a photograph of some plain black stilettoes and
on Photoshop I made them sparkly pink by using a texture and then making it
overlay the photo of the shoes, I went around the edges with the eraser to
clean it up I was really happy with the result. All I had to do now was to cut
them out using the lasso tool, when I did that I copied and pasted them on to
my book cover. I used the free transform tool to change the size and the angle
of them. When I got it to the size which was just right I now had to think
about where the blurb would go. I didn’t
want a big blurb just a few lines, I still thought though that it looked a
little bare soon, so I looked on Google again and thought about having a disco
ball at the top, I found the perfect Image and did the same thing by cutting it
out and pasting it on the book cover.
Now it was starting to look pretty good.
The last thing I had to do was the inner flaps. I
looked at some books I have at home and found that you find reviews from
publications and on the other side a photograph of the author and a little bit
of info about them. I put a picture of myself on it and just a little bit of
information. On the other side I did some pretend reviews.
My book cover was now complete.
Overall I’m very happy with the result of my book cover;
if I could change anything I would get some images of background myself instead
of using stock images from the internet. I also think that I could work on my
Photoshop skills a lot more and then maybe next time I could do something
really creative and different. But for my first proper go I’m very pleased and
proud of myself.
