Penguin Brief - Ideas and Sketches

Book Cover ideas & Character Design sketches

After collecting inspiration off the internet, existing children books, book covers in general and so on. I had a rough idea on how to create and display my book cover version of 'The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole 13 3/4'. Like many common children books, mostly the covers are illustrated in a unique type of style. Therefore, I decide to sketch out some character designs of Adrian Mole. By obtaining some other visual appearance based on the character, I took some of the illustrator elements and changed them in my drawing style. The most common and recurring illustration character design of Adrian Mole is a young boy, with glasses and has a brown curly rough hair. In the scans below are some of my sketches of my version of Adrian Mole, again following on with previous character design. I tried to keep some of the characteristic traits like the glasses hair etc. I experimented with some character expressions, the school clothes, the glasses shape, figure and structure. 

Within the scans of the sketches that I drew, some of the sketches have no facial features. This is because, I was following a style that Noma Bar does, by keeping his illustration designs as flat designs when I edit them via Adobe Illustrator. Most of these scan sketches will become vector shape, as it will be more easier and convenient for me to edit the colour of the characters appearance. 

 

 

For the book cover designs, I have taken some images of google as a guide on how I would like to layout the front, spine and back cover. I have already visualised an idea of making a book cover a diary, however, as the book was set in the times of Margret Thatcher. I wanted the book cover to have a more used and worn appearance, as Adrain Mole is documenting his life within the diary. Therefore, I will add a border around the diary/book, some stamp shapes, post it notes, book mark, school equipment to related to the boy documenting his story. 

Template of a Penguin book cover

Using this template, I will be able to get the correct size of a Penguin book cover template for my designs that I will do via Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.