The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - A Novel
Book cover design
This is a book cover I have wanted to illustrate for a long time now, namely because The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is my favorite book. Taylor Jenkins Reid's novel is a brilliant and emotionally intense story about Ms. Evelyn Hugo, a Hollywood movie star and now a 79-year-old woman who gets in touch with a young journalist, to whom she tells all the details of her life and of the lives of the ones she once loved.
Since I knew the story from start to finish, I had some options in what comes to composition. But since the beginning, there were some assumptions I wanted to work with:
1 - I wanted to illustrate Young Evelyn only (an attractive and blonde woman, slightly dark skin, known by her green dress and, obviously, a Hollywood star);
2 - Since we're talking about the 1950s and the Old Hollywood, I wanted to use a vintage style;
3 - Evelyn's face was the focus of this cover.
For this one to be fully functional I had a lot of work to do at a thumbnail scale. Lineart, colors (value, saturation, hue), light & shadow, balance and composition.
And when I got comfortable with both illustration and composition, it was time to set the colors and effects to create a "vintage mood".
