OUIL403 - Do Judge A Book By Its Cover Development

 After choosing the design I wanted to go with for the book cover I decided to experiment with layout and colour to see what would work best. To do this I decided to work at half the size that the actual book cover would be. 

This is my first developed rough, I really like how I've used the lines to add depth and texture to the black background. I feel that this works a lot better than just a flat black background. I also think that it makes the main illustration stand out a lot more. I added blue watercolour to the characters cheeks. I wanted to try to incorporate the colour blue somewhere due to the title of the book and blue being a colour that is closely associated with winter. I'm not entirely sure why I decided to add this colour to her cheeks but I quite liked the splash of colour that it added to a simple black and white illustration. 
I tried to add blue circles behind the text to make it stand out bit more from the white background but decided against this as it looked quite messy. 

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For this development I got rid of the blue circles that I;d used to frame the text and decided to give the white space at the top a light blue wash with watercolour. Although I quite liked this and thought that it looked cleaner than the circles, I thought it looked quite odd combined with the textured black background. 

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My final development focused more on how I could make this images show a positive side to S.A.D aswell. I decided to explore the idea of adding another character onto the back of the book. The character on the back would have their eyes open looking upwards as a sign of positivity and 'opening their eyes' to dealing with S.A.D. In a sense the character represents the reader. They may feel very low and alone when they first start reading the book but hopefully afterwards they will feel more positive and have a brighter outlook on coping and managing their S.A.D.

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This final development was the one that I decided to go with for my book cover design as I think it communicates my concept clearly and effectively as well as looking the best out of my other developments.