Judge a Book by it's Cover

After I had established the elements that I definitely wanted to include, I started to experiment with them a bit more.

 

Scanning one of my roughs in but moving it about to distort it gave quite interesting effects that I was considering incorporating at one point, but I decided against it because I thought that this combined with the automatic drawings might make the book cover seem a bit too busy, and I wanted to keep it fairly simple.

 

This was a very rough idea of how I wanted the book cover to look. I definitely like how much the blue drawings stand out from the background, but I wasn't sure if it worked with the colour of the brain so I decided to repaint the brain in blue to keep the colour scheme very minimal.

 

I was much happier with this result because it contrasts much more and also fits in with the colour of the automatic drawings. Also, instead of distorting the painting on the scanner, I moved some of the parts of the brain about which I think works better. It is meant to represent consciousness within the brain and I think it communicates this better than the previous process of distorting.

 

These are all the elements I used for the final book cover. I decided against handwritten type on the finished book cover because it didn't give a very refined feel to the book which is what I was aiming for.

 

This is the final book cover. I went for digital type instead because it looks more professional and fits in more with the scientific style of the book. I'm really pleased with the way the brain and the automatic drawings interact to represent both the physical and psychological elements of consciousness. I wanted the end book cover to have more of a vintage feel to it (similar to polish or czech film posters) which I haven't been able to achieve but I don't think this matter too much as a more modern looking book cover perhaps works a bit better with the subject matter. 

I originally was going to fill in all of the blank space with automatic drawings but I think having some negative space is more effective, as it almost gives the feeling that the drawings are slowly spreading out into that space as they're being generated.