The last question in this week’s lesson was a practical assignment.
- Design a book cover for one of the following:
a.) “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Wolf: use complementary colours to express anguish and uncertainty.
b.) “The Maiden’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood: use analogous colours with a contrasting accent to express disagreement and discontent.
c.) “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupery: use secondary colours to express naivety, honesty and harmony.
- The book cover must contain the title and the author’s name.
- You must clearly make use of colour to express the desired effects.
I choose for this assignment to make a book cover of “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. I made myself my own color wheel in CMYK, so I could pick the right secondary colors for my task. Her you can see my color wheel for this assignment and my finished result. I drew my “prince and Crown in Adobe Illustrator, and made my book cover in InDesign. My font for this task was Princess Sofia for the headline, this is a Google font, the same as Baskerville Old Face that I choose for the displaying of the authors name.
The other reason I wanted to make myself a CMYK color wheel for this task, is because a color wheel in RGB would look different. When it says in the task that we are making a book cover, I assume it is for printing. I wanted to see the colors in a realistic way, so I changed my working mode in Photoshop to CMYK. I used Cyan, Magenta and Yellow, as my primary colors, since they ARE the primary colors of CMYK. Instead of changing the blending mode to lighten when I worked on the color wheel, I changed its blending mode to darken. CMYK colors are subtractive, while RGB colors are additive. So remember, if you make a color wheel in Photoshop or Illustrator, RGB stands for red, green and blue and when you come to the step where you are choosing blending mode, you have to apply lighten.
This task was very fun and I learned a lot and I can’t wait to learn even more! 🙂