The Brief: To produce a photographic image to illustrate an imaginary book or magazine cover. Decide on a topic to be illustrated, you could use an existing book and devise an alternative cover that will get the theme or story across to prospective readers.
Although advertising is all around us, every where we look there is some form of it, I found this assignment relatively difficult in terms of thinking of a topic, researching it, the content, the style and the layout. All things that need to be considered.
50 years of advertising, I have a copy of this magazine that shows 50 front pages of magazines dating back to the 1960s to the present day, an interesting research tool.
[Online image] http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/02/01/50-years-sunday-times-magazine_n_1247000.html [assessed on 18/11/2012]
The idea came from my husband who is studying for a degree in Viticulture and Oenology and the house is littered with wine books and magazines, hence the theme/topic of a wine book cover/magazine.
Scribbled notes of ideas and layouts, titles etc
Well this assignment started out to be a book cover, but has since changed to a magazine cover as I felt it had more scope.
I started out by setting up a mini studio with white backdrop and one studio light, a wine bottle, glass and carafe. I took several compositions, uploaded these to my computer and worked on from there. I did a second shoot as I wanted to enhance further some of the previous images that I had taken. These were specifically for the cover.
I used a clear wine bottle, water and food colouring to create this look.
Original image shot using a small studio set up with basic lighting, once uploaded and a few clean ups made and converted the image then looked like this.
I love the fiery effect in the glass and had already thought of a caption "Wine - The burning issues"
After looking at several magazine of hubby's I decided on a classic black and white theme which would surely show off the stunning orange fire in the glass/bottle.
I enjoyed putting this cover together, I found it very satisfying to see the completed cover. I plucked the Decanter title and also the bar code from the internet to finish of the cover, but all other work was created by myself.
I wanted to keep it as clean and simple as possible, but yet being as creative as I thought possible with the almost fire like look in the glass, I love the simple layout and the striking fiery orange colours that the glass and bottle shows.