Do judge a book by its cover - Visual skills

We have been asked to create a book cover for a book of our choice from one section of the library. We need to make a a sleeve that raps around the book. It must be suitable for the book and represent the content, the best 5 will be chosen and put back into the library with the re-designed cover.

Monkey book

At first I chose the book 'In praise of primates' which is a photographic book about all types of monkeys, the book didn't include much text it was mainly photographs. I wanted to create a monkey character or monkey face that represented the different species and types of faces in a single image.

Mad about monkeys

I looked at the book mad about monkeys by Owen Davey. He made monkey faces out of shapes with no outlines, they are really effective because they represent different species of monkeys and are easily recognisable. I like the way he simplifies parts of the monkeys face and manages to keep the character.

 I started by drawing images like Owen Davey's to figure out the sorts of shapes he uses to make the monkeys. I then tried creating images of my own using similar shapes and simplifying features.

These look to abstract and don't resemble a monkey enough.

I like the look of this face but I feel it doesn't look like a monkey, it looks to structured and angular. 

I felt my drawing where heading in the wrong direction. The faces don't look like real monkey, they looked weird like goblins. I created some interesting characters and had fun making and studying how to break them down into shapes. But this would never work for a photographic book about monkeys. The images would need to be more representational and have less character to them in order to relate to the content of the book. I wanted this brief to be a chance for me to work in a more experimental way so I changed my book to 'Native american myths'. I felt I could take a better approach to this book and already had some ideas after looking at indigenous tribes for visual language.