Designing The Queens Game Freebies
Have you heard, have you heard? One month from now, we'll be flailing in feelings for #FeelsFest2017! To be held on October 14, 2017 at Commune Cafe, it's going to be an afternoon of books, live readings and lots and lots of giggling. Very obviously, I can't wait. Not just because of the readings and seeing the community again (we're getting nametags this year and THANK YOU), but also because it's going to be the first time that The Queen's Game will be sold at the event! It's a little launch party for Princess Nina and Prince Felipe too.
To mark the occasion, I decided to design a little sticker for anyone getting a print copy of the book. I love designing book covers and freebies almost as much as I love writing the books, so I thought I would walk you through my design process and help you get a bit of inspiration to try it out yourself!
Ready? Okay!
Step One: Gather Inspiration
This is usually where a Pinterest board comes in handy. Look at your reference material (in this case, the book itself) and from there try to gather pictures that you can use as inspiration for your design. I was looking at the pretty chocolate packaging from Demel (a chocolaterie from Vienna that's been around since the 1800s and kept the original packaging!) and a couple of other things that have been floating around my radar. Plus Van Gogh's Sunflowers, because, well. Sunflowers.
Step Two: Start Sketching!
From the inspiration board, i knew I wanted to try making a round sticker. I knew I wanted to use flowers, for Felipe too. So from there, and using the ideas from the inspiration photos, I made a few sketches. Experiment with different styles, explore what kind of text or look you want for your sticker. No need to be super detailed here yet, just try to narrow it down to what you really want.
Step Three: Final Drawing
Look at your sketches and see which one you're most comfortable working with. Some artists try to redraw their favorites into bigger pieces of paper to really plan out how it's going to look, and you're free to do that too, of course! But since this is a 'quick' version of my usual process, and I was limited by the place I was in (hospital rooms do not make you productive!), I settled with a pen an ink drawing on the notebook I had on hand.
Take a photo of your final drawing, preferably in black and white with really good lighting. This is where your phone's photo editing apps can come in handy, if you prefer to do this digitally. Or else, make a final drawing on your paper and paint away!
Step Four: Painting
You can color or paint your sticker design any way you like, of course, but for this one, I played around on the Procreate App. It's really the best drawing software on the iPad that I've tried, and even the best artists out there use it too! It's definitely worth a try.
Check out the video below to see how I did it! (note how I had to use a picture of a circle to make a circle in the app hahaha).
Step Five: Import to Photoshop, clean up
Procreate has a PSD export option, which saves me a lot of time and heartache. If you did this manually, scan your art into Photoshop, and make some final adjustments. Make sure you delete the background layer and save to PNG!
And that's pretty much it! I'm still deciding if I should go through a printer or just print them on my handy dandy printer here at home, but I'm really happy with how it turned out. People who purchase a copy of the Queen's Game will find this freebie stuck inside!
Got any questions about my process? Leave a comment below. :)