Assignment 5 - Book Cover Redesign (Part 1)

Yes I know this should be assignment 4 but I consider the business package to be assignment 4 rather than it being a part of assignment 3. Therefore this is dubbed assignment 5.

Originally I wanted to redesign a children's book (not sure which one but this was the general idea.) But after digging through my tiny book shelf of recently bought books that weren't packed away in storage I decided to redesign a manga book!

English publishers have manga book covers redesigned from the original to something more eye catching to their intended audience. For example - Touya Tobina's Jiu Jiu.

On the left is the original manga released in japan. 
The right image is the redesigned book cover for the release in the US (and I think Canada.)

So just like those two covers - I want to redesign a unreleased in the US (yet) manga!!!

In order to do that I would need an original copy of the manga (so far its undecided) which means I contacted a good friend and asked if I could have a scanned copy of the book cover from her vast collection. She emailed me some of the covers so I'm sorting through it trying to find one that hasn't been redesigned and released here in the US yet.

This might be getting a ahead of myself... so I'm going to watch the recommended video tutorial(s) first. Then start sketching out the redesign and post the sketches on here later on.

This time I'm not going to hold back on the colors!!! But rest assured its not going to be crazy colors... gotta follow the color wheel rules.

Update Oct. 9th~
Here's a nice little picture with my notes and some little illustrations I worked on yesterday/today.

And because I haven't decided which book to pick I'm going to post the before images on here later.

Oh My Romantic Kumiho v2 and Chronicles of the Grim Peddler v3 (Korean manhwas.)




















<UPDATED>

Here's the (old) rough draft...

But the problem with it was that i need to make my own unique coverart... even though I worked so hard redrawing/coloring the old artwork trying to enhance the lines and stuff. I tried my best at recreating the original ISBN tag.

So I worked on some more little notes stuff and made these... base colors and textured. Each piece is separate layers but these are the pieces put together.

Overall I used 5 different textures for this piece and 1 texture for the background. I'm trying to finish this up as soon as I can.

So far the TOC is still very disorganized (its too embarrassing to show.) Hopefully I can have it finished in time.

Here is the finalized piece...

Took all night to look this over and make sure everything was okay. I made a tiny mistake with the yellow mirror which made me try and add tiny shadows trying to bevel (or was it emboss) the mirror. I finally got to add the bottle!!! Had to remake the Yen Press logo, OT logo, and ISBN tag. Took quite sometime to get the perfect look for the text but then my computer's program froze and I lost it. This is the second best text I could do.