1. Unit 08 - Strengths and Weaknesses
Portraiture & Likeness
I believe that the likeness of my portrait of Jennifer is
very strong, even though Iʼve gone for for a simple
design I think itʼs very possible to tell it is Jennifer,
the structure of her face is prominent and
noticeable despite the simplistic design.
Though those who are not overly familiar with the
Hunger Games may not recognize it since the
design is a bit more abstract than others.
I like the way Iʼve done the shadows and highlights on her, rather than using complex
shadowing and highlighting Iʼve stuck to the theme I decided on for the whole thing and it
works very well.
Composition
I like the way that I have layered my cover, I spent a fair amount of time deciding how to
layer it and finally deciding on putting the flowers at the very back
and having some of the leafs in front of my Jennifer to make her
seem to blend in with the forest more as I wanted her to become
part of the forest, hence the color scheme.
Looking at the cover now I feel like I could have used the space
under Jenniferʼs face better, it feels a bit empty and I feel as if I could have been a bit more
creative with that part as the background looks very nice and I like the simplicity of it all but
thereʼs a thin line between good simplicity and where it just looks lazy, though this was not
the case I feel like I should have used this space much better.
The way I have placed the tree branches I made I think works well as it kind of acts as a
frame for the cover and I like it as it stands out from the background.
Typography
I decided to create the font myself rather than use stock fonts as I donʼt feel like the fit with
my design and would probably ruin the image, I tried to make it look like sticks creating the
words.
I feel like I should have written ʻCatching fire issueʼ or something along those lines rather
than just Hunger Games, I think this would have looked
more professional.
I think the way Iʼve created the style of font though
works well especially for the theme I have gone for in
my cover, it looks simple and more impressive than
using just a simple font.
Though I could have worked on the sticks a bit more,
added more detail to them and made some of the sticks
look a bit broken to add some more life to the font and make it seem less computer
generated and more real and also more interesting to look at.
Since I made the font myself for my cover I couldnʼt change any tracking or
leading settings, but because I drew my font it creates a very natural tracking
and leading which fits the theme that I wanted.
Colour
I wanted to choose a different colour scheme as I knew that everyone would
go for fire, so after watching the trailers I noticed a
lot of forest scenes so I decided to make this my main
theme for my cover, I did research on good forest themed colour
pallets and I picked my colours accordingly, looking at it now I
2. Unit 08 - Strengths and Weaknesses
think it works well and the colours blend together well.
I could have had more variety in my green colours as there is a lot of the same green in
my cover which makes it kind of boring, also
the colour I used of the Hunger Games logo
kind of stands out but not in a good way, I
used brush strokes to try give it a bit of
texture but it ended up looking like a bad
gradient, so I would probably have improved
that by using a solid colour instead or
working on it a bit more to make it look more natural.
I wrote down the codes of the colours I used in a pages document as I went along as I
wanted to use a minimal amount of colours in my cover designs (I have uploaded this
document to my blog as evidence), using this I was able to remove unnecessary colours
from my cover by keeping categories on what type of colour it was (e.g. Greens or Blues).