Red Snapper - a professional makes a difference

I had a good graphic design session with Rebecca Morton at Red Snapper last night. You'll have heard of Beck before on this blog. Dammit - you'll have eaten yoghurt from the pots she designed for Rachel's Organic Yoghurt and seen her work on the Milk Marque lorries. Here she is in action, pointing out something important I hadn't spotted. Of course, as soon as she'd shown me what was wrong it was obvious. She also showed me the amazing things the full verison of Photoshop can do. Well, some of them anyway.

"Look how easily I can get rid of the blemishes," she said.

"What blemishes?" I replied. I'd been really careful not to get oily fingerprints on my work but there they were. And then there they were - gone. In the hands of an expert like Beck the results were frankly mind blowing - and so quick to make!

We've experimented with a couple of ideas but the favourite so far seems to be a refined version of that mugged together design that I cooked up. It's odd but anything with a larger picture seems to lose out in terms of impact. The white space around them seems to draw you into each illustration. That's how it works for me, anyway.

Beck said that we should be careful not to create any problems for the future. There needed to be sufficient space for longer titles and each cover illustration should follow the outline of a pyramid, which fortunately I seemed to be doing subconsciously. She really liked the new pictures - which pleased me no end since I really value her opinion - and said how much more coherent the pictures were. She neatly side-stepped my earlier problems with overlaying text on the illustration by simply separating them out.

We worked up cover versions(!) for both The Horsepower Whisperer and The Wormton Lamb and they looked really good. But Beck's only just getting started. She's going to work on them some more. I've asked to her to come up with some more suggestions. Go faster stripes are nice but not essential. It shouldn't take her long and I can't wait! All that patience I had when creating the illustrations has evaporated. entirely.

New cover illustrations

Here's the new cover illustrations for The Horsepower Whisperer. As with any picture on this blog or the one known as Engine Punk if you click on the image you'll see a large image. I was happy enough with the earlier cover design for some time but as soon as I'd revamped my website it looked a little staid. I realized I could do better and ever since then my publishing adventure has been on hold while I embarked on a remembering-how-to-paint trip. I donned blinkers and stopped doing many of the other things I enjoy like writing and welding in my determination to add as much pizzazz as I could to my covers.

It became an obsession and I entered that dark tunnel where you strive for perfection knowing that it is really an impossible dream. I never really know what keeps me going during these times for there are no travelling companions but at last I have emerged, blinking in the sunlight, reconciled to the lack of perfection but reasonably happy with the result.

It’s been a trip down memory lane, too. The last time I’d used gouache or water colour was a t school. In fits and starts, I stumbled across the techniques I’d left behind nearly 30 years ago.

In the process of producing this picture for The Wormton Lamb, my whole house has become my studio. It looks a mess with materials, papers, PCs, scanners, printers, motorcycle exhaust awaiting fitment and piles of books everywhere. But really it’s a creative flux. All this jumbled up stuff has been doing my suede in for weeks but the juxtaposition of unrelated elements – like BMW zorsts and old ammunition boxes full of marker pens – sets my ideas off, like sprinting mad March hares. I have experienced a creativity explosion that is not over yet. I was determined not to stop until the illustrations for both books were finished.

I am now close to having a tidy up. The explosion has create a lot of fall out.

And fluff, too. Where does it all come from?

The next stage in this adventure will be to experiment with different layouts. Here's one I mugged up quickly using the old cover illustration for the The Horsepower Whisperer. I still have other ideas to try out but this one seems to work for me. One thing with which I've struggled is how the text and pictures fit together. The titles are different sizes and the visual focus or action is always in a different place. It's very easy to enter an endless loop of adjusting and re-adjusting elements. What colour should the stripes be? Should the text be black or a matching or complimentary colour?

But for now I've reached the "Sod it" stage. It's over the Beck at Red Snapper for her professional input.