Exercise: Creating a mock up

I chose ‘To the Lighthouse’ by Virginia Woolf, which I’d read many years ago. The edition I read didn’t have a lighthouse on the cover, featuring instead a snippet of ‘The Red Skirt’ by Ceri Richards.

I wanted to draw a lighthouse for my cover being inspired by the one near to where I live. I reread half the book and was moved by a reference that Mrs Ramsey made to the lighthouse; it having two short strokes and a long one, the long stroke being hers. The book is written in a complex, interweaving style of prose which I wanted to try to portray in the texture of the drawing. During the first half of the book Mrs Ramsey is knitting a stocking for the lighthouse keeper’s son as well as ‘knitting’ the other characters together with her observations and careful manipulations.

I did some very rough sketches at the beach

 And had a look at some covers of other editions

I found the book quite dark and very much dated so that’s something I tried to convey with my drawing too.

I started by drawing a line visual to the size of the cover:

And altered the style of my modern lighthouse to that of one from the 1920’s, when the story was set

Pen drawing

Manipulated in photoshop by duplicating and multiplying the layers and adding a layer of a photograph of a wave breaking on the shore from my ‘photo sketchbook’ to give more texture

Inserting the drawing into a scanned copy of my book cover

I wanted to try an ‘inverted’ illustration as well ie white on black so I made a couple of ink drawings, one solid black with a drawing in bleach (the 8 stars represent the Ramsay’s 8 children) and one which I later inverted in photoshop

Having inserted these into my mock up cover I still prefer the first version as it has an aged quality and fits best with the cover design of my edition of the book.