Thursday, September 30, 2010

ABC book cover

Old-Fashioned ABC book. Click to enlarge.

Last weekend I attended the Mid South SCBWI conference. There was a contest that attending illustrators could enter. It got down to the week of the conference before I finally got a little time to put together this book cover. One of the options for the contest was to create a 10x10 cover with the letters ABC as part of the art.

I thought it would be fun to try something a bit different, so I cut all of the shapes for the illustration out of black paper.

I scanned the black shapes, and then assembled and colored them in Photoshop. I liked the results. A square cover is a very boring shape. I ran a little strip down the left side that made the white space a bit less square. I also repeated the vertical strip with the vertical animals and letters. Lots of fun to do.

I seem to gravitate toward making things simple and fun. But alas, simple and fun does not win against incredibly well rendered illustrations. The winning pieces were really nice. Congrats to all.

Now, where did I leave that box of Kleenex?

11 comments:

Kristin Dudish said...

Put your kleenex away... I think your "simple & fun" illustration is great :)

p.s. I love your old fashioned can phones (I remember those)!

Nikkie said...

I think this is great! Thanks for sharing your process.

Alicia PadrĂ³n said...

I really like how it turned out, specially those cute characters! :o)

psychopooch said...

Fun! Love the end result of the lettering too.

Jannie aka Chickengirl said...

I love it. The animals are so cute with their unique shape. I love the process. Thanks for sharing...I'll have to try that sometime to get my creative juices going :-)

Christian said...

REALLY nice!

michael robertson said...

nice!...love the simplicity.

Morph Waffle said...

Great stuff and I love how you shared your process, cute!

Ellen Byrne said...

Very cool piece! Thanks for the lesson!

Kay Aker said...

Super fun wonderfulness!

Tracy said...

I love this! Had I been a judge, I would've picked this one in a heartbeat :) I really appreciate how you shared your process, too. This is AWESOME :) Gotta try it now myself!