Hello humans!
So I started reading a book called Heidi by Johanna Spyri to try something new. The main thing that made me want to read the book was that it was both colourful and confusing.
To illustrate my point, let me show you what the cover of this book looked like:
So as you can probably guess, Heidi is the girl in the picture. She has straight hair, red cheeks and is holding some creepy animal. I'm not sure if you can guess what it is.....but it's a goat. I found this from reading the book in which is really describes her obsession with these animals.
However, I noticed that the cover girl of the book didn't really match the Heidi that was described in the book. One of the main differences was that Heidi didn't have straight hair. In fact, the girl had curly and black hair which is quite different from having straight and brown hair.
Another thing that bothered me was the creature that was on the cover...Something isn't right. The goat looks like a drawing that came out of a meme than a book cover. Looking more closely at the girl's dress, it was evident that this art was rushed and most of it was taking advantage of online tools as this is most likely a digital picture. If you are confused by what I mean, just look at the detailing of the hair and the sun.
With all of these problems, I decided I would replicate the same cover but with all the corrections. I faced a couple of problems which I guess I could try to understand why the illustrator messed up? From experience, I don't really draw curly hair all that often. Not only that, but I'm not 100% on how to approach it. So I tried my best and later decided to try drawing more curly hairstyles on the characters that I draw.
The next problem was the goat....how do you draw a baby goat? I searched up pictures in which they all showed a much older goat. I decided an older goat would be better as there were no baby goats specified in the book anyways. Key features of the goat were it's horns, little beard and the detailing at the bottom. Normally, there would also be a bell around the neck but I decided to skip it as it seemed extra.
So, here is the more accurate version of the cover:
The goat definitely looks better. However, I must admit that I ended up using the same colour for the horns as for the hair so you cannot easily see them. I tried to replicate what the author did with the sun, but it's much harder to do on paper than it is online. So as for the sun, if it was online, it would be the same as what I have done. I also changed the font for the title to better voice the type of writing in the story. The language used is definitely not the daily English used by common society but one that is more sophisticated. To better word it, I would say it is written in a modern Shakespear type of English which is why I have attempted fancy calligraphy for the title. Overall, there were many advantages to doing this artwork online as there is less effort required, but I had fun doing it on paper. It also reflects better who Heidi really is.
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