Exercise - Making a mock up

For this exercise I chose a book that I have had for many years, and which is still a favourite.

The book tells the story of a group of boys living in a small seaside town in America.

They are facing the prospect of losing their homes through developers, and decide to spend their last day together.

They find a map in the attic of central character, Mikey’s house, and set off in pursuit of fame and fortune.

The original cover shows the characters hanging from a stalactite above a faded treasure map, and reading the blurb on the back of the book it is not hard to see what the brief was.

The brief was obviously to show characters from the book and film, in a perilous situation, to show adventure, treasure seeking etc, but I am not sure this is clear.

I decided to go with something that would reflect the style that had been created with the original cover, but with a different content.

I started by sketching out some ideas, using images from the film, it was important that I see if I could draw a good likeness.

Using these drawings I could then move on to a thumbnail sketch of the layout.

I drew several thumbnails, but I went with the first one, as I liked it the most, as it was the most balanced, as far as content was concerned.

I enlarged this image by 1.5 times, and left spaces where the text, title etc would go.

Following this, I photocopied some of the images of the characters I had previously sketched, cut them out, then using a lightbox I placed these under the enlarged layout and then traced the outlines.

Once these things were placed, I drew in the title text, finally, I traced all of this onto a sheet of Bristol board as this was close in texture to the original as I could get.

Because of the style of my painting I chose to use acrylic paint as the media to work with, because it is easy to correct any mistakes, and you can paint thickly or thinly as required.

Overall, I think this image has worked well, the only technical drawback was that the paper buckled slightly.

The colour of the parchment as the background, makes the other images’ colours stand out well, and the text on top, that will be added during production would be clear to read.