Category: Part 3

I started working on my cover ideas from the thumbnails I had done earlier in my notes. I decided that this time I wanted to work traditionally. I cut some sheets of bristol board in the dimensions I needed and laid out some pencil drawings using some of the references I had gathered. I compiled a few extra references for the occasion, using some of my cemetery shots from my exercise on making a moodboard, and I looked at some illustrations of Batman for use with Dracula’s cloak along with some menacing shots of Bela Lugosi to capture his distinctive clenched hand positions.

Here are some shots I took during my drawings.

Part way through my black marker ran out so I had to wait until the following day to get to the art store and buy a new one.

I wasn’t yet ready to choose which image to use for my mock-up, so I scanned them both and developed them further digitally before making a decision.

For both images I wanted to change the gamma and contrast to make sure the blacks were really black. For the cemetery image I wanted to digitally colour it, and for the portrait I just wanted to make some minor adjustments.

Here’s the revised version of both images.

At this stage I was really happy with both images. I decided that specifically for a book cover, I preferred the cemetery shot. I went ahead completing my mock-up by adding in the book title and publisher details.

I cropped out the Penguin Popular Classics logo and added it to my image to match the book cover.

I really like this cover, and without being overly cocky I do prefer it over the original!

I just had one final thought. Penguin have since discontinued their Popular Classics print, and Dracula is now printed with the Penguin black label. If I were really making a mock-up for Penguin today, that would be the label I’d be using! I did one last version using the modern label.

This has probably been my favourite exercise to work on so far. I think the colours in the final render are really eye-catching and effective as a cover, and the details are simple enough to be readable but complex enough to draw you in. I think it also really fits with the novel itself, it’s very spooky and gothic.

In terms of where it wasn’t successful, obviously it can be cleaned up a bit. My linework can be neater and my anatomy can be a little more accurate. I wonder if my colour choices can improve as well.

I was really excited to do this exercise. I wanted to give it a lot of time and spend a lot of effort on research, like the exercise on research in part two. I already had the perfect book to use for the exercise. I’ve recently finished reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which I really enjoyed, but I got my copy in a second-hand book shop and I didn’t think that the cover was particularly good.

I don’t think this depiction of Dracula is very recognisable or accurate to the book. This scene isn’t really how it’s described in the novel either. After reading the details of this exercise I was eager to redesign the cover myself!

I brainstormed how to approach the cover. There were a few images from the book that really stood out to me as potential sources of inspiration for a cover drawing. All of my ideas shared Dracula himself as the primary subject. The first thing I wanted to do was to gather a lot of different reference material and work on how I wanted to portray the Count.

To start with, while I was under with the flu earlier last week I tried to use my recovery time, let’s say, somewhat productively. So I marathoned a good many Dracula films through the ages. It was a fascinating exercise to see one our most enduring pop culture symbols and how his portrayal has aged and altered over the years, and some of the films were genuinely good. I took notes as I went, trying to take inspiration from the most effective performances, considering a few factors, mainly it’s closeness to the source material, the effectiveness of the performance on its own terms, and its impact on popular culture. Some I liked, some I didn’t, but without turning my learning log into a movie review blog, I was most taken by Bela Lugosi’s portrayal in the 1931 film Dracula. His performance was totally captivating, his expressions and facial contortions were striking even after all these years, and his on screen charisma and presence was just outstanding. His portrayal was probably the most influencial and enduring, so I wanted to rely on his image pretty heavily.

The films I watched were Nosferatu (1922), Dracula (1931), Dracula (1958), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992).

In general when watching the films there were a few things I noticed. The closeness of Dracula’s appearance to that of the novel was usually pretty poor, and almost always missing the signature moustasche he wore in the original material. I wanted to keep in line with the novel, this being a cover for the book and all, so I wrote out the main descriptive passage of the Count in the book itself.

His face was a strong, a very strong, aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils, with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth. These protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed. The chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.

Throughout his portrayals, I found that Dracula is usually either portrayed as completely shocking and grotesque, or else charming and handsome. The description in the novel itself seems to present an ambiguous picture. There are obviously elements that are very strange and off-putting; the pointed ears, the protruding teeth, “extraordinary pallor”. But to me at least, there seems to be an almost regality to him. The very strong chin and nose kind of evokes an imposing but not necessarily disturbing figure. I think part of what made Lugosi’s portrayal so effective and frightening was his calm, gentlemanly exterior. That’s what’s really unsettling about him as a character, the illusion of class and nobility, hiding this virtueless monster beneath. I wanted to experiment with this ambivalence in my artwork.

One thing that helped me a lot in the exercise on choosing content was to do a sort of digital collage of some of the reference material I was using. In addition to the various film portrayals I had seen, I included a portrait of the historical inspiration for the character, Vlad the Impaler; a portrait of Stoker’s friend who was supposedly a strong influence on the character and the person whom Stoker personally wanted to portray him in a stage adaption, Henry Irving; and some artwork by Yoji Shinkawa and Mike Mignola portraying Vamp and Giurescu respectively, they aren’t Dracula, but I like their looks and feel like they’re in line with what I want to attempt with the character. One final source of inspiration is from the Castlevania video game series which is very silly and fun but actually I feel has a pretty decent depiction of Dracula.

I also gathered as many other Dracula book covers as I could find. Interesting one of them used an exact idea of mine, and I think is a pretty effective cover. [This one].

From all of my research and notes, I was torn between two ideas for the cover. The first is the iconic scene of Dracula caught feeding on Lucy in the cemetry, and the second is a close up portrait of Dracula’s menacing face. From experience in other exercises, I didn’t want to be too quick to throw out either idea, so I thought I would develop them both a bit more before working on a final artwork.

References

Bram Stoker’s Dracula. (1992). [film] Hollywood: Francis Ford Coppola

Dracula. (1931). [film] Hollywood: Tod Browing.

Dracula. (1958). [film] UK: Terence Fisher.

Nosferatu. (1922). [film] Germany: F. W. Murnau.

Nosferatu the Vampyre. (1979). [film] Germany: Werner Herzog.

Stoker, B. (1994). Dracula. England: Penguin.