When challenged to design a book cover with a focus on hand lettering I jumped a the opportunity to take colors and imagery that is very familiar to me and mix in something I haven't done in years: hand lettering. Over the last few years I have become more involved in writing and editing creative writing, so I tried to use that to find a way in to make this project something that I could care about.
My digital painting set up is great, but anytime I try to write something with the stylus it does not look inspirational or communicating anything really other than just shaky and awkward. So I went a different route and got out my inkstone and small calligraphy brushes. You grind ink from a solid block and once it is at a thick enough consistency it is ready. You can see it wasn't ready at all times :)
I had more comps with imagery to speak my concept instead of text, aka my comfort zone. But once I realized I hadn't left enough space in the design for the author's name I had to change it up and I tried one with just text and my little star doodles. I thought it held the page quite well. Glowing things always make me think of PS, so I enjoyed the doodle and handwriting combined with that little digital touch.
I smoothed the text's edges for the title quite a bit in PS with a mask, and in my name I tried to do less smoothing and let the edges just be as they were. I am not convinced it all matches up because of this, but it is a great reminder of the traditional media and the paper quality, ink quality brush quality all needing to play nicely together. I always tend to not worry about it because I'll fix it in PS, but when the human touch of the handwriting is the point of the piece, then all is in play and important.