The Cover of my New Autobiography

I’m ridiculously excited to bring you the cover of my new autobiography (my old autobiography sucked).

The actual book may never actually be written, but I’ve done the cover for it as one of the projects for my Layout class.

The Brief: You are to design the cover of your autobiography- a visual interpretation of yourself, your interests, goals, personality, etc. Your design should be totally hand rendered, in any medium or technique you like (no computer work). Include the title of your book and your name as the author.

The Thumbnails:

Looking at some of these thumbnails I have no idea what I was thinking. I couldn’t tell you how an escalator relates to my life and represents me, but there are at least two thumbnails where I was using an escalator as the main feature of the composition. That’s what thumbnailing is for though, getting ideas down on paper quickly without spending a lot of time drawing or thinking about them. Once I got all the thumbnails down I went with a pretty literal representation of myself sitting at an easel.

The Rough Sketch:

I wanted an off-centre composition for the illustration that left lots of ‘white space’ not only for the text (title and author’s name) but also just to let the image breathe a bit. The rough version didn’t leave enough space around the image in my opinion but I liked the painterly look of it.

The Submitted Cover:

The final submission was ok. I wasn’t overjoyed by the result but it met the brief and I had to move on. The final is dark than the rough sketch and doesn’t have the same radiance. In the rough I primed a sheet of white paper with yellow acrylic, whereas the final was completed on a warm grey paper. I stenciled in the text pretty roughly to finish it off.

And that’s about all I have to say about that.

LM.