For our Conceptual Communications class we had to create weekly artwork based on a prompt. I decided to redesign well-known book covers based on each. Below are each of the three covers with their original photo references that I used to combine into a single image.

One of my goals for these projects is to create a professional book cover using entirely free resources from Pixabay, Dafont, and other online sites (with the obvious exception of Adobe, which sadly isn’t free). Below you can see each photo I used in each cover, and you can find every resource free online.

Prompt: TREASURE

For this cover I wanted to do a cover for a Lord of the Rings Trilogy edition, and I wanted to show Gollum’s hand lunging for the Ring after he killed his brother in the Fellowship of the Ring. I first puppet warped the hand into an unreal, grotesque shape, then used the liquify tool to extend the fingernails. I painted in the dirt and grime in the nail beds, and then did several Level layers, blending modes, and plastic wrap filters to get the hand wrinkles over-emphasized.

I added a boat-load of blending modes to half a dozen layers to get the underwater effect and kept pushing the colors to be more and more extreme until I was satisfied. The Ring has “One Ring to rule them all” written in Tengwar Annatar with a glow effect.

Prompt: SUPRISE

I wanted to depict the moment Lucy discovering the wardrobe for the first time, since it’s one of the biggest “surprises” in the novel, as well as one of the most iconic moments. I overlayed a wooden door carving with pieces of wood to make the doors to the wardrobe, and cut portions of fur coats off stock models and stretched the sleeves to hang in the foreground with the pine needles. Originally I attempted to make the colors more blue on orange, but it started getting creepy feeling instead of heartwarming, so the blue was pulled way back and I allowed the warmth of Narnia to take over.

Prompt: FALL FROM GRACE

Frank Peretti is one of my favorite authors, and his This Present Darkness duology is probably my favorite set of novels of all time. While many people might think of demons when they think of “fall from grace,” I still wanted to try to depict it in a fresh way. I added the city line to the horizon of the road, added the church and the Ferris wheel from the first chapter of the book, and warped wings to fit them along with the model’s shadow.

I specifically chose the fonts and textures that mimicked newspaper vibes, since one of the main characters is a small-town journalist, and if you look super closely, you can see the skull floating ominously in the clouds.

While this scene isn’t specifically written in the novel, I think it gives an overall impression of the tone and themes in the story as we see very demonic elements heading toward the unsuspecting town prominently featured in the narrative.