Twelfth Night for SelfMadeHero

Since October, and for the next couple of months onwards, I've been working full time on the graphic novel adaptation of Shakespear's Twelfth Night for SelfMadeHero's Manga Shakespeare line. It will end up as 193 black & white comic pages and 9 coloured character pages. The colour pages are already done and I'm working on the first batch of pages from the abridged script. Sadly I can't show any work in progress at the moment but the cover and some information about the title has been released on SelfMadeHero's website.


Fast food chains, sale labels, road signs - things that are designed to steal your attention tend use the primary colours, red, blue and yellow. I decided to apply similar reasoning for my cover design. Each character is dominated by a primary, but it's not quite as eye-catching as say, a Burger King sign.


The composition is simple but I hoped that it would read more easily this way.
There were about 10 alternative cover thumbnails of varying complexity, but in the end it was the very first one that I drew that got chosen. Perhaps that says something about that first intuitive idea you have when given a new assignment.
For the same reason I find it very difficult to keep my comic page thumbnails rough. The strongest imagery come from the first time I immerse myself in the a script, so I tend to put down little details before I forget them. On one hand it's good in that the first impression is preserved but on the other hand it makes me more reluctant to scrap things and start over from scratch, which is needed sometimes.