Today we were set the task of designing a book cover for the book 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' by Ken Kesey. We were also given the opportunity to choose our own book to do a cover of so I chose the first book to the Darren Shan saga, 'Cirque Du Freak'.
In the book the main character (Darren Shan) goes to see the secret freak show 'Cirque Du Freak' in an abandoned theatre with his friend Steve, where one of the performers is a secret vampire (Larten Crepsley). Darren steals the vampires deadly performing spider because of his interest in arachnids, but things go horribly wrong and he is forced to become the vampires assistant to save Steve.
I chose this book because I wanted to do an illustrated cover, and it had a lot of interesting themes/characters.
Here are some of the existing covers:
This first cover is new and is only in the UK, it shows the vampire character and the spider, and I really like the tone of the illustration, I don't like the gold/orange border though, as it seems to cluttered.
This is the original cover, the imagery is good and creepy and very minimalistic but I personally think it's a bit boring.
This is the cover I produced:
Like the UK cover, I did an illustration of the vampire character and the spider, as both characters are central to the plot. I originally wanted to do a silhouette but I also wanted a dark background so it wouldn't have worked. Instead I did a normal illustration but with a light source from behind, I did this because I wanted the spider to really stand out, but because of the dark-ish colours it would be hard, hence why there is a shadow between his hands/under the spider. Finally I added a web, as it looked odd with the spider just floating there.
For the text I used the font called Carnevalee Freakshow, as it had the creepy circus feel I wanted.
