steps to making a good book cover

http://www.publishingtalk.eu/self-publishing/four-steps-to-create-a-great-book-cover/ Above is the website that helped me a lot when creating my book cover. On this website it gives you the basic steps to follow to create a good book cover.I found it very help full for many reasons,for example I work a lot better when I do things in steps especially work that needs to be sent off for a competition,I believe everyone else does too with the odd exception. Step one on this website tells you to create a mood board even though it might sound a bit pretentious to some. It all so says that mood boards are great as it helps you put all of your ideas into one place so that when you start putting the cover design together you don’t start with a blank canvas,I totally agree with this but I all so think it helps a lot as it gives you a lot of inspiration.Step two was to look at other book covers that are in the similar area but as people have created tons of book covers for the heart of darkness as it is a very well known book I merged step one and two together. Step three was to be honest not that help full to me because it says you should use other software as a substitute to photoshop if you are not so good with the software. Step four talks about how you need to take your spine of the cover into deep consideration when creating your book cover as it needs to link in with your front and back cover. I am glad i read this ,it made me think a lot more about the spine of my book cover.I might have forgot about it and then i would of had to go back to the drawing board after creating a cover.

Fonts

I needed to look into what fonts would work well on my cover so i started off by looking for some fonts that would be used for horror novels ,I thought this type of font would look good on my book cover as the book is similar to a horror or something a long them lines.I used the website www.dafont.com to download the fonts. This website is very helpfully,I use it a lot when choosing my fonts,it helps me when deciding on what font I need and sometimes what theme I want my piece of work to be,I usually start with the text when creating something with text in,I do this because I think the font makes or breaks a piece of work. This website makes it very easy because it has a series of themes that you can choose from,the themes range from fancy to techno to holiday,there is a lot to choose from. Below are a few pics of some of the fonts i tested out. I thought these fonts were very cool and i liked them a lot but i didn't want people to think my cover was a cover for a fantasy novel, maybe the book wouldn't be taken seriously enough so I decided to go with a font that was more traditional and i think my choice was perfect.

Steam boats

I looked into steam boats as the book heart of darkness is a story about a character called Marlow who travels on the Thames and on the Congo in Africa and compares the places and their darkness,so i thought it would be best to do some research. The steam boat is called a steam boat because it uses steam to power it down rivers typically driving propellers or paddlewheels. The term steamboat is normally used when speaking about smaller ships that travel down the rivers or lakes. As steam power became more reliable they started to use steam power on bigger vessels for big ships that sailed the ocean. I wanted to find a couple of photos of steam boats so i could get some inspiration for creating my cover. Below are the some of the photos I found. From my research i found out that steamboats come in many shapes and sizes but with many similarities.I took this into consideration when creating my cover.Even though you cant see the steamboat in my cover fully you can still tell its a steam boat by the steam coming out of it and the shape of the back of the boat.

Scarecrow(inspiration for nightmares comp)

I want to look into different types of scarecrows,they are one of the main things that comes to my mind when i think of nightmares. I dreamt of them sometimes when i was young,I watched batman a lot as a child in the show there was a bad guy called the scarecrow.Below is a photo of what he looks like now in the films today.The film is targeted at people over the age of 16. I like the old looking mask and the very sinister looking eyes.Gives off a creepy feeling when looking at it,this is what i want people to think when they look at the work I create.Below is a pic of the batman i grew up looking at.This scarecrow is less terrifying than the previous one but as it was done many years ago and was aimed at kids I still believe it would be scary to a kid,if I wanted to target my drawings at kids I could look into creating something less sinister but still making it look like it could be in your nightmares.

Monsters (inspiration for nightmares comp)

In my 5 pieces of work i want to depict the theme nightmares in the way of monsters so i looked into all the types of monsters i could find that interested me. I first of all looked into monsters in games,i found a few monsters that i have grew up with till this day the first one is from crash bandicoot second gears of war then league of legends In all 3 pics the monsters have eyes that are not shaped like a humans eye,They are more insect like in shape.I will pay attention to this when creating my monsters,the colours of the monsters seem to be darker then the heroes in these games so i need to give the monsters in my pics dark colours so they represent the nightmare theme.

Fuseli "the nightmare"(inspiration for nightmares comp)

While trying to develop my ideas about nightmares and how i could depict them, i had to think a lot about what nightmare really means, and i realised that actually this is a subjective concept. What is a nightmare for one person is not necessarily so for another. I looked at older artworks and these are often religion based, to do with the devil or evil “creatures” waiting to do you damage or take you off the path of good. I looked at Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare which was painted in 1781 This is a good example of how the person asleep is dressed in white to represent good and the evil creature is on her torso and he is waiting to corrupt her. So while it represents a nightmare, it is not really nightmarish at least not these days, so I need to think about context. I think this is too much of a mini - story, for it to be a nightmare now, I think it has to be more nightmarish.

surrealism and nightmares (inspiration for nightmares comp)

Surrealism and nightmares As i have been studying art for a while now the topic of nightmares made me think of surrealism. This is defined as being an artistic movement that attempts to describe/portray the subconscious, and so naturally this often leads to nightmarish pieces of art. I am thinking of Dali to start with, perhaps he is the best known surreal artist. The depictions in many of his works are nightmarish, this lead me to think of “darker” art works, like Edvard Munch’s the scream, which is now linked with the horror film of the same name. Though he was not a surrealist painter, this image is certainly macabre and there is a surreal element to it as far as I’m concerned. And it is the stuff of nightmares too. Like many recognised works Dali’s painting « Sleep » is nightmarish for sure, in a surreal way. All theses images have affected my thoughts on nightmares and how to create a piece of art myself, it has to be something that I would be afraid of, I think that looking at these pictures from this perspective has helped me define that much.