Illustrated Romance Book Cover For A Dummy Book
This romance book cover is a response to a brief set by AOI's Inside Illustration course asking to mock up an existing illustration into a book cover with the liberty of inventing a book title. I’ve noticed that romance and fiction book covers often use travel illustrations, one of my focus areas. So I decided to use an illustration I was working on a few days prior to the course and adapt it to a book cover. It’s a travel illustration of Syracuse in Sicily. This is the sketch showing also the space to accommodate the title and author name.
The funniest part was coming up with a title and a story for the book.
I decided that the protagonist of my book was Mia, a woman craving a fresh start who, on the spur of the moment, decides to book a one-way flight to Sicily to reinvent her life. I believed this was enough to start thinking about the title. My final choice fell on “The Sicilian Getaway”.
Time to choose the fonts. I chose handwritten, imperfect fonts to match the story and genre of the book cover I was creating.
I’ve added a brief summary of the story to the cover to spark the reader’s curiosity, as it’s common with many illustrated romance book covers.
I mocked up the final image into a book cover, et voilà!