100 Thumbnails Workshop

To begin our second unit of second year, 'Professional Practice 2: Platform' we were given a briefing into the importance of using thumbnails to get initial ideas drawn out on paper quickly and effectively.

Our first task of the unit is to create a book cover design out of a choice of three books for the 'Penguin Student Design Award 2018'. I chose 'Noughts and Crosses' by Malorie Blackman because it stood out to me as the most interesting book of choice. I started by reading the book, I hadn't read it before so I made sure to read carefully and try to gain as much as an insight as I could into the key themes, characters and settings. The book features themes such as friendship, racism, distrust, romance and discrimination. 

'Noughts and Crosses' is categorised as a Children's Book by Penguin, not suitable for younger children however. It could also be considered suitable for Teenage or Young Adult readers.

The workshop involved drawing 100 small rectangular thumbnails that each featured a different cover design for the chosen book within them. We could draw one cover design and then do a series of others that linked to the first cover design in some way, perhaps just changing the composition or scale. 

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For the first set of 10 thumbnails I created, I made drawings of hands. I either combined the noughts and crosses symbols within the hands or I made one hand black and the other white to represent the different skin tones of the two main characters. Callum is a white 'nought' boy and Sephy is a black 'cross' girl. I also experimented with drawing character design, key scenes or symbolism that is evident within the book. 

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I decided to use pencil for each drawing because I enjoy using pencil for initial sketches, tonal variation can be quickly added with a harder pencil and mistakes can easily be erased or altered. 

Once I had finished drawing all of my thumbnail designs, I chose three of my best designs to develop further. The numbered thumbnails I chose were 73, 75 and 94.

Look out for my next post to see how I developed these three chosen book cover design ideas further. 

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Thumbnails 97-100