Penguin Book Cover Competition 2011 (final book cover design)

After the making and photographing of the work I decided to go with these two photographs and use them for my front and back cover. The image on the front cover captures the moment where the yellow flowers are falling all over the town. I chose to only feature one single house as the story takes place in the same house, generation after generation. I wanted it to stand alone, as if in solitude.

There are things written in the book that make us question whether Márquez ever meant Macondo to be interpreted by the reader as a real place, hence the house being gone on the back cover but the yellow flowers still lying on the ground. I wanted to illustrate the uncertainty of the village being real. I ended up with this as my final design:

Penguin Book Cover Competition 2011 (photo studio work)

After my model houses had been built I needed to capture the moment when the yellow flowers (I used yellow petals) fall from the sky and down onto the village. Kat was kind enough to help me as she knows much more about studio lighting and photography than I do. Here are some of the photos we took whilst we were in the studio:

Penguin Book Cover Competition 2011 (process)

I entered the penguin book cover competition this year, but did not end up on the short list unfortunately. However, my fellow student Tom Rainford did, so a big round of applause for him! His design looks great and you can see it here.


We were asked to create an eye-catching and contemporary new book cover for 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' by Gabriel García Márquez.

l wanted to focus on a small section in the book that really moved me and put me in a special kind of mood:

“A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by.”

I wanted to recreate this moment visually, so I decided to build model houses and make my own little town where these flowers could fall. Here are a few crappy pictures from the process:

Winchester School of Art Degree Show 2011

So this is the invite that was designed for the WSA degree show this year:

If you like art and alcohol I think this will be right up your street! Anyone who wants to come have a snoop is very welcome. There will be a bar and a shop where students (including myself) will be selling cheap ace art work. Here is a little taster of some of the work I will be showing:

Hope to see some of you there!