Toad illustrations
As Toad of Toad Hall, or Mr. Toad, is one of the main characters within Wind in the Willows, I decided to focus my front cover on him. Toad is a character within the book that you can't help but love, the sort of loveable rogue that you find in a number of tales.
"Mr. Toad is an anthropomorphic common toad, portrayed as the village squire and a bit of a fop, being the wealthy occupant and owner of Toad Hall. Mr. Toad is very rich, has his own horse, and thus able to indulge his impulsive desires, such as punting, house boating and hot air balloons, and his penchant for Harris tweed suits. Toad is intelligent, creative and resourceful however he is also narcissistic, self-centred almost to the point of sociopathy, and completely lacking in even the most basic common sense."
This description of Mr Toad really sums him up for me, and I wanted to make sure that I displayed a number of his characteristics within my illustrations.
I started off my sketching out the man himself, taken from a memorable image of him within the book which has been referenced on my Design Context blog. A few edits were made to the original and certain aspects were included to make sure it was evident who the character was. These included his driving gloves, his cane, bow tie, suit and waistcoat. His expression also reflects his personality.
My original idea was to use quite a loose and uncontrolled style, which I achieved by lowering the opacity of colours, and filling in blocks using the pencil tool and a tablet. This didn't achieve the desired effect, however, there I decided to simply use the live paint tool to add colour.
The colours chosen were referenced from images of Mr Toad, and although they appear rather garish, they cannot be changed too drastically as this will change the character's appearance/style.
Frames
My original concept was to place Toad within his own frame, as though hanging up in Toad Hall. He seems like the type of character that would have portraits of himself up in his own home, therefore this seemed appropriate. I used loosely drawn out frames to place the illustration in, experimenting with colours that were relevant to the content. The frames with hearts are slightly less appropriate, however, I will experiment will all of the above designs.
Cover Template
I experimented with a number of different frames and colours, however nothing really seemed to be working. I didn't like the colours that I had chosen and I was struggling to see an end picture. However, I felt that the concept was strong and I wanted to make sure that I persevered with it. To stop me from changing the colours every two seconds, I felt that I would be able to get a better idea of the overall appearance and layout if I created the title.
As I had already include illustration within my design, the title was going to have to fit in with this style. The title of the book was therefore handwritten using a tablet. Things started to come together in my head a lot more once I had the title done, which I could work around.
I then went on to create a wallpaper pattern that the portrait would be 'pinned' onto. This was made up of objects that were seen throughout the book including dragonflies, willow and plants. The colours chosen are reflective of the river that is noted throughout a number of scenes.
To get a better idea of how the final cover was going to look, I decided to remove the toad illustration as this was putting me off. It was at this point that I decided to remove the stroke from the illustrations, which is something I have never experimented with before. This flowed a lot better, and complimented the title.
I could then add the toad back in, removing the black stroke, which I found was really effective and is something I'd like to experiment more with. Now I had the main foundations, I could then move onto adding the mandatory information, such as the author, blurb and spine text.
For the typeface, I wanted something quite subtle that would blend in nicely with the title. Lane - upper was chosen as the original typeface, which didn't distract too much attention from the rest of the cover, yet was still readable. However, when it came to adding the text for the blurb, the lower-case of the typeface had a strange decoration underneath the 'o' and therefore this wasn't going to be appropriate.
Due to the above issue, the typeface was changed to Aller. The bold version was used on the front cover and regular for the body text. This was the right contrast and it allowed the author to stand out.
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