The design brief for my lastest ebook design project Tears Of Shallow Men was: design a cover showing a portrait of a middle aged South African woman whose trying to hide her emotional pain, holding back anguish and tears by putting on a strong face.
As I was also going to be publishing the ebook, knowledge of the script gave me an idea of what the story was about which helped me to get into the mind of the author and understood what she wanted to have conveyed on the cover of her ebook.
The first thing I did was to design an African 3D character model, getting the right balance of look that would appeal to the intended audience and also fit the broad range of the characters as described in the story.
Here are just six images (These images are but a fraction of the total number of concept renders I produced) showing you select design stages of the design process I went through before coming up to the final design.
Image 1
One of the earlier concepts. Notice the short hair? I had already worked on the expression at this stage.
Image 2
Trying to get the right angle. I thought that the jewelry design looked pretty nice here. Notice the hair style change?
Image 3
3D model vs rendered output: Screencast. Notice the blouse addition? I modelled the blouse based on a reference image provided in the brief.
Image 4
The final image design. The "pose" in consultation with the author, was decided upon to be facing straight forward. Notice the subtle sadness on the face, eyes and almost pursed lips like she's hiding a tonne of pain?
Image 5
One of the cover concepts using a model version without the blouse.
Image 6
The final cover design.
The ebook is available for purchase and download here.