Exercise: Shape, Line and Colour

For this exercise I will design a children's book cover based on a traditional story or folktale using simple shapes, lines and colours.

Working off from the last blog (research task: Constructivists), I got to look at a variety of artists that work with shapes, lines and colours, because of this I am really excited to give it a go myself! After looking into different folktales and stories I decided to use the old tale of Rapunzel, I remember as a kid reading books of Rapunzel and watching Barbie Rapunzel-- so why not!

Overview of Rapunzel

For anyone not knowing the story of Rapunzel, the story tells of a girl with very long hair whose locked away in a tower after she was taken from her mother, she stayed in the tower imprisoned by the evil witch that took her.

One day the Prince heard singing and investigated where he met Rapunzel, he wanted to marry but she was unable to escape. Off he went to find some silk to save Rapunzel, when the evil witch came back and cut off Rapunzel's hair and banished her to the desert.

When the Prince came back and saw the evil witch who tried to kill him, but he fell on thorns and went blind. He blindly stumbled and came across a desert where he heard singing, it was Rapunzel. They both reunited and she wept over him and healed his vision, they were overfilled with joy and went off to get married.

Thumbnails/Colour Ideas

Process

I wanted to collage for this exercise to replicate the same look as Vladimir Lebedev with the seamless paper look, so I started off with painting a black piece of paper for the background, Then I cut out oblong shapes for the faces and a wave shape for the hair. I painted the colours on the paper and cut them out to make it easier to focus on shapes.

To add to it I added little circles of red to capture the look of faces without creating the eyes, nose and mouth.

Finding Fonts

Final Work

Reworking

I wasn't very happy about the outcome, it felt very lack luster so I went back and tried the other design that I was interested in doing.

I used the same method as last time however I wanted to utilise shape more by creating the braids in form of circles, I wanted to create some dynamic shapes to incorporate with the sharp shapes.

From there I trialed different layouts to figure out what was the best way to showcase the subject for better composition.

Final Work

After getting feedback from other people this was the most popular...

Thumbnails for internal pages

I tried my best to keep simple shapes and bold simple colours, I even tried out a black and white version which I prefer. I tried to focus on create positive and negative shape language all while keeping it simple, so with the witch I used sharp shapes and keeping Rapunzel and the Prince rounded in shapes.

Evaluation

For this exercise I had to make a children's book cover using simple shapes, lines and colours based off of the research from the research task that I previously done; I did a new technique by using a collage method, which I had a lot of fun with.

I started off with a very simple one and it didn't turn out as strong, I liked the idea but it wasn't good in execution. I liked the flow and how simple the shapes were, but I didn't like the red rosy cheeks and some of the paper doesn't flow as nicely.

Because of this poor execution, I decided to do my second choice, which turned out better. It's a lot more child-like with bright colours popping off each other, and it has a lot more fun shapes. I really like the flow and it goes well with text-- thankfully since I tested the fonts side by side, I got a lot of feedback from family and friends about which worked well, and I feel like because of that I was able to create a stronger outcome.

Overall, this exercise was challenging but fun, I've not done a lot of abstract work and I am impressed with the outcome.