Project 2: My Final Book Covers

My book was Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare.  I started by researching the novel and the genre of the novel.  I also researched the three genres I chose; Paranormal Romance, Graphic Novel and Science Fiction.  Then I wrote out and sketched several ideas before narrowing down to the three basic ideas that I used to sketch out in Photoshop and Illustrator and played around with them before submitting the rough ideas to the blog.  I used the shape tools, text boxes(obviously), color fill, blending, blurring, color change brushes, patch tools, healing brush tool, and color matching with the blog brush.  After the initial critique on the blog I went back into my ideas and changed colors, fonts, even the text tagline as had been suggested to make the ideas look even better. 

            Where concept is concerned I will go through each book cover and describe them one at a time.  For my Paranormal Romance I had originally decided that Romeo needed to be an alien while Juliet is human.  I was going to make him green with antennae reaching out above his head toward Juliet’s face.  Then that night I watched Star Trek IV and V and decided that Romeo must be a Vulcan! I took the movie picture of Romeo and Juliet from the 90’s and tweaked it a lot to change his eyebrow and ear and the coloring beneath the eyebrow to make it more obvious.  I couldn’t however stand to give Leonardo Dicaprio the straight across “dumb and dumber” bangs that Vulcans tend to have.   I placed a hand doing the “Live Long and Prosper” sign slightly opaque over the gun.  I also placed the tagline beneath the title from Star Trek but worked with the story.  For my Graphic Novel I decided to go with an illustration from an old movie I remember when I was very young that was pretty much based on Romeo and Juliet.  I took the image and changed it a lot to fit the style I was going for.  I changed most of the colors and took out her wings.  I created a heavy trace around their hair and clothes.  Changed her make-up.  I also had to turn his smile into a slight frown by inverting it and smudging it.  Then I added the color boxes with the text and tagline.  For my Science Fiction book cover I found some futuristic images that I thought went very well together, especially the color pallets.  I edited the images by cropping, removing the water mark (don’t worry I’m not using them for $), changing the color of her eyes to stand out more, I used color boxes to make the text stand out as well.  I kept everything very metallic to give it the futuristic look.  I also think Romeo looks a little robotic but still human, which also helps the Sci-Fi feel.  I really liked this project and I think my ideas came out well.