Penguin Brief: A Clockwork Orange: Defining Ideas/Making the cover

DEFINING IDEAS/ MAKING THE COVER 

Once I had the idea in place for hands instead of cranes, I began to scan in my hand drawings (drawn from my own hand as the reference) and go over them in a charcoal brush on photoshop. I kept each hand on a different layer as I knew that eventually I would have to move them around the type. 

The brief for A Clockwork Orange wasn't particularly fussed over having hand drawn type but for this book I felt like it was something I wanted to develop. I invested in some new nibs and ink and had a go at writing the words over and over until I saw a set that I could bring into the actual cover.  In my issuu pictures I have shown the selected type next to the final type. 
At first I just scanned them in and put them into the book as ink, but as I placed the hand's next to them it looked out of sync. This lead to deciding to go over the type in charcoal on photoshop. 

I went with black white and orange as the colour palette because I wanted something simple but very powerful and I worried that messing around with complicated colour palettes would take away from the immediacy of the cover. Although it was very cliche to stick to those colours, I don't regret it because I think it works so well. 

Out of all of the book covers done, this really was my favourite just because I got so involved with it, listening to the soundtrack and drawing ideas down.