Book Design for To The Stars

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I was able to design Grace Ingles’s senior portfolio project for her professional writing degree. I loved being able to do illustrations this semester, and had fun laying out the interior designs for this book in particular. I was able to play off of the design and color scheme of The Girl Who Drank The Moon, and use a similar typography as the Lunar Chronicles, which I really enjoyed.

Book Design for “Efflorescence”

JennethBook Covers, Design, Layout Design1 Comment

I had the opportunity to design the cover and interiors for another professional writing student at my alma mater. Since designing your own book isn’t a requirement for this class, students often enlist the help of their art major friends. In my case, I offer to do the full cover and interiors at a discounted price for PCC students.

Book Design for “After the Fire”

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At my alma mater, seniors studying Professional Writing must compile their best writing samples—including fiction, poetry, advertisements, and essays—and publish them in a physical portfolio at the end of the semester. Most PW majors enlist friends or hire out the design work so they can better focus on editing their pieces, and I’ve enjoyed doing a number of portfolios for the last few years. This was Emily Thompson’s final portfolio design. She wanted an artistic flair to the cover similar to my PCC Survival Guide book. Many of her portfolio pieces demonstrated themes of hope and revival from difficult or trying times in life, and she wanted to correlate that theme with the fireweed blossoms that grow up after devastating forest fires. For this reason, I decided to play with color clashing with monochromatic greys. I deliberately chose to make the edges of the book charred and ashy looking, but as the blossoms come into the foreground, I wanted them to become bright and colorful.

Life Update: Post Graduation

JennethWriting7 Comments

The last year and a half has been a constant churning of life’s ocean waves when set on a giant spin cycle. Between COVID and finishing up my master’s degree, I barely have an internal clock or a solid sense of time (as if I had one in the first place). But now things are finally getting back to normal (well, as normal as post-graduation adult life can get), and therefore it’s probably worth giving a life update.

End-Semester Book Cover Redesigns

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This is the second half of my semester redesigns. For our Conceptual Communications class we had to create weekly artwork based on a prompt. I decided to redesign well-known book covers based on each. Below are each of the three covers with their original photo references that I used to combine into a single image. One of my goals for these projects is to create a professional book cover using entirely free resources from Pixabay, Dafont, and other online sites (with the obvious exception of Adobe, which sadly isn’t free). Below you can see each photo I used in each cover, and you can find every resource free online.

Mockup Cover Designs for RED Trilogy

JennethBook Covers, Design, Layout Design, WritingLeave a Comment

Eighteen-year-old River Ardis lives in a future where terrorists infiltrate the country as teenagers. She tries her best to keep her head down and away from the unrest until she meets a distraught girl from the 1990s. But little do either of them know, the oppressive government has been hunting the time traveler for years—and anyone associated with her. I began writing my time travel dystopian trilogy when I was fourteen, and it’s since undergone extensive edits for the past ten years. While I intend to pursue a traditional publishing house, which would be responsible for cover designs, I wanted to design my own cover and layout for a class project.

The Genres of Red Riding Hood

JennethArtwork, Book Covers, Design3 Comments

For my graduate Conceptual Communication class, I had to do a project that would depict the idea of “compare and contrast.” I decided to do a genre study and create a set of book covers that showed the classic story of Red Riding Hood in six of the biggest genres on the market.

Mid-Semester Book Cover Redesigns

JennethArtwork, Book Covers, DesignLeave a Comment

For our Conceptual Communications class we had to create weekly artwork based on a prompt. I decided to redesign well-known book covers based on each. Below are each of the three covers with their original photo references that I used to combine into a single image. One of my goals for these projects is to create a professional book cover using entirely free resources from Pixabay, Dafont, and other online sites (with the obvious exception of Adobe, which sadly isn’t free). Below you can see each photo I used in each cover, and you can find every resource free online.

Library Fantasy Posters

JennethArtwork, Design2 Comments

I wanted to create a series of posters one might find in a local library for the prompt “cause and effect.” Essentially, if you read amazing books, you travel to amazing places. I chose to illustrate three classic fantasy worlds in the form of travel posters: Neverland, Middle Earth, and Narnia. In addition, I wanted all three of them to be able to hang next to each other to create a continuous scene, with Aslan leading the way “further up and further in.” I also added a comet in the sky of the Neverland poster as a reference to the Disney prequel series I read as a kid.

Magic of the Real Kinetic Type Video

JennethDesign, Professional Videos, Videos, Writing2 Comments

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVkyWKQu5F0&w=560&h=315] Last summer I was able to attend the Realm Makers virtual conference, where author ND Wilson was the opening keynote speaker. His perspective on the fantasy genre and the Christian author’s role was game-changing to me, and it really left me with a new perspective on God’s creation and fantastic storytelling throughout history. Wilson believes that we live in “God’s fantasy novel,” in that, God’s creation and history is fantastic, and is the origin for all fantasy fiction (Marvel comics inspired by the Book of Judges, for example). In the original keynote, Wilson echoed some of JRR Tolkien’s and CS Lewis’s beliefs on the fantasy genre, and charged his audience to live in God’s novel as a character they would want to read about. Since a lot of his points stuck with me and other conference attendees, I wanted to adapt his talk into a short video that explained his view on fantasy, informing them of a new and unique way to see God and storytelling.