Elegy

I worked for an author named Melissa Greene who sells her own fiction books. The target audience was family and friends. The challenge they faced was that they needed a cover for their book but did not know how to go about it.

The job for me was to bring her ideas to life. She had a vague idea of what she wanted for the cover but didn’t know how to communicate it. She wanted me to paint the project because I was a good friend of hers and knew I could meet her expectations. The aim was to communicate the theme of the book to the audience. What made this project interesting was that I had to illustrate across a two-page spread.

I used my knowledge of backgrounds to tackle this subject for my client. The approach I took on the project was to start with the figures in the painting and then move on to the background to unify the piece. I knew I couldn’t approach this painting like my other drawings that had a smaller canvas size. This painting was a landscape. I had to bring attention to the cover without making the background too distracting for the synopsis. Extending the clouds in the background was the easiest solution. The clouds were soft and weren’t too distracting to the viewer. The results were a beautiful cover that encompassed everything the client wanted. She then asked me to do 2 more covers after that since I was so successful in translating her ideas into a physical product.