Alternative cover

I made a second book with a black cover, unfortunately the second print of the pages was in greyscale so I can't see if the black cover brings out the colours of the print through the key hole in the cover but I do think the black cover works much better. The crisp black book cover looks like it is a finished professional cover. I made this as a test so the cover is made of black mounting board as that was the only material I found that would work at short notice. I cut the board down to the correct size, slightly larger than the pages to disguise any imperfection in the folding of the book. The white edges of the card di not look good at all, they highlighted any mistakes in the cutting or texture of the board and acted as a distracting border around the keyhole. I coloured the edges with ink, it actually worked much better than I thought it would. the porous texture of the card soaked up the ink and match the matt finish of the card. I wouldn't use this method in future but it did help me to be able to see how my book would look if I remake it with more suitable materials. I wanted to make another belly band for the book but this time cut out the lettering, I didn't take into account the holes within the 'A' and the 'P' of 'escapism'. The letter was not clear without them included so I decided to add the holes as white eyes directly onto the cover of the book. I used paint pens but reflecting on it now I should have used cut paper. It wasn't clear that the white circles were meant to be eyes so I decided the make the eyes into one of the characters from the book by adding hair to the cover with cut paper. Once again I suffered from leaving this second copy of the book until the last minute and only had a few choices in terms of colour. I chose to use grey as it was the closest to the colour scheme of the book and contrasted with the cover. I would ideally like to have used either a darker grey. I think a darker grey would have matched the tones visible through the keyhole, the colour I have used is too bright, it becomes the focal point of the cover overpowering the other elements. Neither of my covers are in any way perfect but I have learnt a lot about materials and design during the process of making them. I really enjoyed illustrating the book and like the narrative so I think I will work further on this project after I have handed it in so that I can get the finished project up to a standard that I am happy with.