Here’s the story about how two different pieces of art were accidentally perfect to turn into a book cover! I started this project with only one goal in mind - making art specifically to turn into prints for my art business. For a while I’ve been wanting to tackle the world of veg but it was something which kept getting pushed to the bottom of the to do list. That is until my lovely top tier Patreon member (who gets an original collage every month) requested I made a collage inspired by seed packets. This was it! My opportunity to pull the long lost vegetable idea from the depths of my potential future art pile. So I began by making a mood board of all things gardening and veg related, at this point not really knowing what I would end up making. I filled a page with the objects which caught me eye the most, and even started to make up my own seed packets which I instantly loved.
With the success of my sketching session under my belt, I felt confident enough to paint my textures and start winging a finished piece, confident I could come up with the composition once I had all the shapes cut out. When painting my textures, I was directly referring to my mood board of veg to really hone in on the colours and specific mark making techniques which would best represent each vegetable I was mimicking. Because the shapes of vegetables for the most part are pretty nondescript, just a bunch of round blobs and spiky blobs, I really wanted to nail the textures in order to give them clear defining features.
With my paper painted (around 20 sheets) it was time to begin collage number one. A small A6 piece inspired by a seed packet.
I found it easiest to pre cut out a few vegetable options, finding the best texture nuggets on my paper, and cutting it out into a wonky pointy circle. This way I could play around with placement and swap and change until I had something I liked. This did mean I ended up cutting out many many shapes which didn’t get used, but that’s the collage way unfortunately! Nothing goes to waste of course, I’m sure they’ll end up being used up in a piece down the line.
Happy with my little A6 collage, I packed it up and sent it off to its new home, knowing I had a much bigger piece to tackle next! I wanted to offer an A4 veg collage print in my shop, so I got working on a more detailed piece, but this time jam packed with veggies, all overlapping and bunched together. Let the hours of moving circles around commence!
I began this piece much like the last, by cutting out most of my rough shapes first. I played around with potential placements for a few hours, discarding shapes which weren’t working, cutting out new ones, then realising what I had originally was good. Trimming and tweaking again and again. It’s a simple process but it sure is slow!
Eventually my patience paid off and it started to look kind of good. Good enough that I began to finally stick some paper down. I found it looked best when I grouped together my veg in to small shapes and big shapes, adding a bit of uniform to the piece while still keeping it nice and loose. I also made sure to keep my biggest shapes along the outer edge, to frame the smaller shapes inside which made for a nice composition.
With both pieces of art made, a little gem of an idea popped in to my head. What if I turned these into a cover for a book about growing vegetables! So how did I turn two separate art prints in to one cohesive cover?
I began by painting, you guessed it, another piece of collage paper, this time knowing I would be scanning it in and working with it digitally. After a few colour tweaks and rearranging, this became the backdrop to my veggies, because nothing screams gardening quite like a whole lot of dirt! For the title I originally pictured it being embossed gold, so tried to mimic this through my pretty limited editing skills. While I still stand by the idea, I had to be realistic with I was able to make, and gold embossing is not a skill I know how to do, nor have the equipment for - time for plan B.
I traced my chosen font on to a piece of paper and painted it in water colour, being purposely wobbly with my lines to give the font a softer hand make look to better fit my style of illustration. For the back, I repurposed the veg and seed packed in the first collage I worked on, cutting out the individual elements to create a frame around the cover. Play the video below to see me piece together the finished book cover!
I also whipped up a quick end page too, by re arranging my favourite pieces of veg.
Finally, to finish my dabble into gardening books, I printed off my cover and stuck it to an existing book so I could get these lovely photos. Just don’t look any further than one page into the book or you’ll be very confused to find the inside is all about Minecraft architecture! I could pull off quite the prank with this book to an unsuspecting member of public! I’m beyond happy with the cover and I think it will make a lovely addition to my portfolio.
Thanks for reading,
Emily :)