book cover development

 this is a screen shot of my characters for the front cover of my book. I'm choosing the wild wood scene where mole gets lost and ratty has to come and find him. I'm choosing to do the scene were Ratty has found Mole and Mole is so glad to see Ratty.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              i done a sketch in my book and then scanned that into the computer and roughly drew over it with the pen tool. it show ratty picking mole up from the ground where he has been hiding. I'm going to fill in the colour of their clothing and also add the feet to the characters. on the back cover its just going to be trees which i have already sketched in my book and have scanned into the computer i just need to start to draw over them in illustrator and give them a wild wood feel. 

blurb font

these are a selection of fonts for the blurb on my book cover. at the moment i like most of the fonts and i think once i have got my main idea on illustrator i can start to get an idea of the font needed. i wanted something the was easily legible and also abit different to look at. i wanted it to be fun and child friendly too. 

pitch

On the 2nd of december i pitched my idea to the class. in my pitch i covered 

• font choices
• colour choices
• the scene of my font cover from the book
• my sketches in my sketchbook that backup my design
• initial research 
• illustration type

• 
  

i went on to talk about my original idea of doing ratty and mole in the boat but i changed my idea as i felt it was to overdone and i would be making it to difficult to design a completely new design. i went on to choose the scene in the wild wood where ratty has found mole. i think tho scene is good for a children's book because it still has the scary element of the wild wood but also has a background lesson of friendship. some feedback i received was that some of the font choices don't go with the scene of the book so i will have to look into other font choices before i fully decide what i am going to use. my overall idea was liked by the class and they said they liked the illustration style i was going for. other comments i received was that my colour scheme was quite earthy and this is because when ratty find mole it was quite dark so i wont be able to have bright bold colours. I have sketched up my final idea and am  now putting it into illustrator to see how it ill turn out. 

sketches

 these are some sketches that i have done in my sketchbook. i wanted the characters to be friendly and welcoming to children. I've been reading the book and also watching a few versions of the films to try and work out the personalities of the different characters in the book. on my illustration of ratty and mole i used watercolours and watered down acrylic paint and over layed them with a black ink to highlight the main lines in the drawing. i used a ink brush to smudge the fur on the side of rattys face. Mr Toad was done by using coloured pencils and then drawing around the outlines with a fine liner in black. after reading the book and thinking carefully about all the different scenes in the book i first went with the idea to draw ratty and mole on the river, in a different illustration style, after exploring this more by trying out trees in illustrator i decided that it was to overdone so i scrapped that idea and went back to the book to refresh my memory of the different scene's and went on the start to design an image from the wild wood. i want to use the scene where ratty finds mole so the front cover of the book has a happy/gloomy feel to it.