I recently entered the House of Illustration / Folio Society 2018 Illustration Awards.
The brief was to illustrate 3 different stories from The Selected Advetures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle.
I didn’t get selected, but it was a great exercise to practice some book cover designs.
As I was also preparing for my MA show I was short of time and only spent about 2 weeks on the 4 images required for the competition.
Having now seen the amazing quality of the illustrations on the longlist selection, I realise that I should have spent much longer than 2 weeks on my entry! There’s always next year…
The covers here have been reworked for my portfolio.
The first cover is an image of Dr Watson, to illustrate the story The Man With the Twisted Lip. The face is drawn from life using charcoal and putty rubber. I then scanned and layered this digitally with a monoprint texture, before adding the text.
The second cover is an image of Sherlock Holmes and Reginald Musgrave from the story The Musgrave Ritual. Holmes is working out how to measure the length of the shadow from a tree (that no longer exists). This illustration is charcoal drawing, monoprint textures (digitally merged with one of my photographs of trees) and digital drawing.
The third cover is the actual cover that I entered into the competition. The brief asked for a more graphic response for the cover binding, using just two colours plus a third colour from the binding fabric. This is rubber stamp text and digital drawing. I was trying to challenge the reader to use their powers of deduction like Sherlock!
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