The design of Flight of the Evening Star
by Erin Walker
Book and cover designer of
Flight of the Evening Star
Erin Walker was born in Sydney. When Erin was little she moved with her family to live on a farm on the central coast of NSW. She is horse crazy and was lucky enough to own her own horse and lots of little ponies amongst many other farm animals. A country girl at heart, she grew up loving the open space of the outdoors.
From a young age Erin loved art and being naturally artistic, She loved to draw, especially horses! At school she always chose art as a subject and did well. She had a dream to one day design book covers. After school, Erin studied for 3 years and completed an Advanced Diploma of graphic design.
Since then, she has enjoyed working in the graphic design industry for 9 years. During this time she learned the skills of designing for print, web and multimedia. She completed an advanced Adobe Illustrator course and discovered her ability to draw and create pictures digitally.
In 2004 Erin went on a mission trip to Siberia, in Russia, to volunteer in children's summer camps as she has done for the last 4 years. On this trip Erin met Justyn and in 2007 they got married! Erin designed the cover and the inside of Justyn's third book "Flight of the Evening Star" and enjoyed every minute of it because she had the freedom to be really creative and had to face different challenges of how to create the right design. She is keen for Justyn to write more books so she can keep designing book covers!
Erin's website: www.revivegraphics.com.au
Old medieval book
My Research
After gaining an understanding of the story, the characters and overall theme of the books I did some research.The books are set in medieval times in a fantasy land, so I researched this era and collected images of old books, castles, doors, torches, walls, textures etc from medieval times.
What was most interesting was the old books I found which were creatively designed hundreds of years ago. In the days way before the computer, these books were designed and illustrated beautifully by hand with intricate borders, calligraphy, colours and large letters at the start of the text. These inspired me to create a similar theme.
Special Fonts
Based on these ideas I created my own font for the books including the title and the large ornate letters at the start of each chapter, the border and other elements that appear within the book.
(left) Examples of the large letters
The Map
Based on the map in the previous book I had to draw each element separately such as the forest ,volcano, border, etc. I then put them all together on the background.To make the map look really old I burnt the edges of real paper, crumbled it up, then scanned it into my computer. I added textures and distorted the map to make it look like it was folded.
Layout
Designing the layout and setting out the book was time consuming.
The design in a book needs to be consistent all the way through it, so I had to make sure that everything was the same on each page and where it needed to be, for example the page headers, chapter titles, page numbers, story break etc.
It was much like a jigsaw puzzle. I had to make 85,000 words (approx) fit onto 288 pages! I placed the pictures in the right spot in the story, and found different fonts to use for special occasions such as Smokey's speech, batty latin etc. and then when it was all done and changes needed to be made I had to be careful not to muck the whole thing up!
The Cover
The cover was designed using a number of different methods: illustration and photo montage. Each element from the torches, peek hole and door straps to the brick wall were all drawn separately in Illustrator from scratch and then rendered in Photoshop. I used photos of different textures such as real rust for the door and the green eyes are real cats eyes! I took the Illustrated characters which were created by Rod Allen, coloured them and placed them in too. I designed and drew the font which I placed in which would later become gold foil after printing. I loved designing the cover as it had many challenges and was a lot of work but it was soooo fun to do!