Monday, March 7, 2011

Frankenstein Book Cover

This week our assignment was to pick a book and recreate the book cover, with new ideas, concepts, and images. I decided that since we had recently finished Mary Shelley's brook Frankenstein in English, I could recreate that cover, so I began research on previous book covers to get an idea of what I wanted to do.




 


This is what the book cover looked like of the one we just finished reading. To me it doesn't repersent what Frankenstein is all about. When Mary Shelley made this story she wanted it to be something scary, that would give people goose bumps, that kind of thing. I know that people say "Don't judge a book by it's cover" But you and I both know that everyone does that. If I had just picked this book up off the shelf I honestly probably wouldn't choose to read it, the cover is so boring, there's nothing scary about the cover, it doesn't represent very well what the story itself is about. This is a great book and if it hadn't been for my english class I probably would have never thought twice about it picking it up off the shelf.

While creating my cover I was keeping in mind everything I just mentioned, I knew I wanted to make a new cover, one that wasn't like the original at all, and one that would grab people's attention, not make them put the book back on the shelf. I took what I felt like were the most important symbols in the book and assembled them together in a creative way that I think is more interesting and connects to the book a lot more.



That's it. I like keeping things simple but I think I added elements that would be more likely to grab people's attention. Along with the the title and author, I chose the lightning because in the story, Victor Frankenstein discovers that with electricity, he can bring life into dead things, what better way to represent electricity than lightning. The other picture explains itself, I feel like if you're going to write a story about a creation, you should give the readers a visual of what he looks like, so that's my reason for putting that picture on there.

I didn't really have any trouble with this project, I enjoyed doing it, and got done fairly early. I also feel like with the cover I accomplished everything that I wanted to with it: Keeping it simple, Making it more interesting.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

New Animals!

When I sat down to start thinking of ideas of how to mix animals to make a completely new one, I decided that 1) I wanted to be completely creative. 2) I wanted my new animals to be humorous.

This was my first animal, I had the most fun making this one, I think it's a little humerous. All I did was take the wings of a bat and put them on the back of an elephant and colored in the wings to make it look like it was part of the elephant. The tail is a feather duster, Once i put it behind the elephant I thought it made for a good tail for this animal.












This was animal #2... Yes that is a Giraffe's head, and yes that is a dauchsand's body. For my second animal I knew that I wanted to mix a larger animal with a smaller animal because I felt like the complete opposite porportions would be funny. The only problem I had with making this animal is that I couldn't figure out how to mix colors between then dog's body and the giraffe's head, I tried several things but everything looked crappy and done by a sixth grader, so at the end of the day i decided to leave the two seperate peices their own color.









I liked this project, it was probably one of my favorite from this class. It was frustrating when my first animal didn't save right but overall i'm happy with what i made.