Book Jacket Artist Statement

My book jacket presents a short story I wrote about a guy in a very dissociative state that ends up driving to a cliff in the middle of the night. So on my book jacket, I drew a silhouette of a car on a cliff on top of a starry night sky background to symbolize the setting of my book. The lone car silhouette also represents my main character’s isolation and loneliness. I used a dark color scheme to create this solemn but mysterious mood. I think my book jacket is successful at accurately representing my book and giving people who see it and haven’t read my story an accurate impression of what it is about.
To create my book jacket, I used Adobe Photoshop, a bit of Adobe Illustrator and InDesign. I came across some struggles, for example, I envisioned my book jacket with a photograph of a cliff side view from the inside of a car dashboard and simplistic white text. However, I didn’t get the opportunity to drive to the beach and shoot photographs of cliff sides. But I believe I grew by being forced to improvise. I followed a youtube tutorial to make a starry galaxy texture for the background and learned how to manipulate effects like outer glow and how to use the brush tool in Photoshop. And for my publishing house logo, I used a combination of the shape tool, the pen tool and the brush tool in Adobe Illustrator.

 

Click here to view the Book Jacket as a PDF MichaellaG_BookJacket