School poems cover designs

One Monday in our lecture for our Final Major Project we were given three different topics and were shown examples that could help us for each theme, these were: Childhood Memories, Identity and Inside our heads. We were then given till the Thursday of the same we to make plans and a final cover design to present in front of three different schools who were making poems based on these themes at the time. These schools are Gloucester Academy, All Saint's Academy and Barnwood. Unfortunately I did not manage to create a final cover design for the theme childhood memories yet I was able to create drafts and ideas for it as you can see below.

Ideas page for Childhood memories

For Identity I thought of multiple ideas mostly conveying around emotions, some of these were focused on splitting different parts of the heads and to show different emotions in each part of the head, other ideas were based around superheroes and using stereotypes of them to show the image, an example of this was having the figure have loads of stress and argument attacking him while he uses a shield, similar to the comic book character Captain America to defend himself and keep himself sane. However for my final cover design of this theme I kept with the Superhero theme but changed it to show a superhero standing on top of a building ready to go into action and save the world, however cowering behind him was another form of the hero that was scared of going into the action, through this image I was planning to show that everyone has fear within them but they will try and hide it and act brave to not show how scared they are. When I showed this to the school, the students seem to really like the my design and the idea behind it and some even related themselves to the idea, they also gave me some good feedback and how I could change the design for the school would like it such as since it was an all girls school they asked if I could change my design to have a female hero instead of a male if they chose mine for the final picks which I agreed that I could. Unfortunately I was not chosen for the final designs which was disappointing but after the feedback and seeing the other illustrators' work I understood and agreed with.

Ideas page for Identity

Final design for Identity

For Inside Our Heads, I though of a few ideas which I could use as my cover design. As a reference for this design I looked at an old children's comic from within the Beano comics that I used to read called The Numbskulls which was about little creatures that lived within the persons body and had different jobs around the body to control it safely. For this I made some drafts of drawing showing the head of the person and all the people inside that were doing their jobs, however this was too similar to Numbskulls so I didn't use it. A design I made that wasn't reference to the comic was showing a computer that held a large amount of data of the person's mind that someone could access through different folders depending which part of the head they wanted to look at. However for my final design I went back to my reference of The Numbskulls and created a design that showed a large office hallway with multiple doors that had a sign on each one showing the different area the people inside the head will work in and I showed it extend out so then it seemed like it would lead to other doors that would lead to other parts of the body. When I showed this to the school a few of the students liked the idea, however I wasn't given much feedback which was disappointing since I wanted to know how I could've improved. Unfortunately this design also was not chosen for the final picks for the poem's cover.

Ideas (left) and final design (right) for Inside our Heads.