Penguin Project Week 3 & 4

These two weeks were mainly used to read the book, which thankfully I was able to gain access to via the Penguin Website. The problem I faced with this is my dyslexia slowing me down, but it was solved with enough determination to read more than usual.

I began jotting down all the words that stand out to me:

As I went on less and less words begun to catch my attention, although I come up with a few ideas:

The first one was to create a cloth close up of a wedding dress, although this idea was scrapped quickly as I believe it was superficial and with the current climate and no Photography skills, it was not the right path to venture in.

The second idea was to create something that would represent the net of lives that the book explores, and the serious topics explored in it. Although this idea needed to be backed up by culture, and with the limited time to explore this topic, I could not find any symbolism that would fit. This brought forward the idea of using colours to make the point instead of lines, I looked up the symbolisms of them in Indian culture. This brought forward another problem: as this culture is both old and vast reaching, there are many different meanings for each hue. I looked at a few websites just to be sure I would make the right decisions and that I would not be offensive, as a massive worry for me is Cultural Appropriation.

The colours I chose to use for the book cover are three: Blue, Yellow and Red. I believe these three hues represent well the book, and also three is the number of protagonists of the book. I decided to add Black to the mix because of the evil/repellent of evil meaning in the culture, as there are serious topics.

These are the illustrations that I come up with:

The fist picture was created with the idea of imitating the bits and pieces of life explored in the book, but at the same time I was not satisfied with it. The same concept was to explore further the beautiful patterns of the culture. This brought forward the other 5 ideas. I made them use Krita’s mirror tools, one vertical, the other horizontal, as I had no other ideas on how to create them otherwise. I believe I went a bit overboard with these because I had a lot of fun making them.

The next step was to create the book covers, I downloaded the InDesign file and started working. At first, I had some difficulties navigating the file, but I eventually figured out a way to stop messing it up and creating something that I am proud of.

There are some clear tweaks that I have to make, such as making the text more legible, and a bit darker. Although I want to have to work only on one idea, so I asked my family: in contrary of previous times, I did this not because they are the closest people near me, but because they are avid readers. As of now the ones that are on top are 3, 4 and 6.

Thoughts and what to do next:

I believe I have been able to pick up the slack these past two weeks, which is comforting. The next step would be to see what the feedback is going to be like in the crit and work from there.