Designing a Book Cover

The illustration at right is from a tutorial by P.J. Lynch, a highly regarded Irish illustrator of children's books (as well as many other publications). The tutorial, posted at Scamp, an Irish illustrators blogspot, takes you step-by-step through Lynch's process for designing a book cover for an edition of the classic short story, "Gift of the Magi," about a young married couple too poor to buy each other gifts one Christmas. The story is about how they each make a sacrifice to secure a simple gift for each other.

Lynch started by sketching out the images from photographs he had taken of models. He then scanned his drafts into Photoshop and manipulated the composition, noting that he was somewhat new to Photoshop. He also used it as a tool to block in color areas. Later, he used this manipulated draft as a source for his final hand-painted image.

Just as important as the images in his step-by-step tutorial is a close reading of Lynch's text. He talks succinctly about how he uses his models and photographs as source material, but then he talks about how he rearranges elements for best compositional effect.

For example, at one point Lynch moves a bare wood table from the right side of the composition to the left side, noting, "the compositional breakthrough was when I saw that the table with the gift on it could be used as a way to lead the eye in, as well as helping to define the space and telling a little bit about Jim and Della’s impoverished state."

These are complicated concepts for young artists, the idea that composition "leads the eye" through a picture or that simply rearranging elements on the picture plane can somehow provide information about the people in the picture that wasn't there before. But particularly engaged middle school student, and certainly a high school student would benefit from being introduced to these artistic concepts as part of their studio art instruction.