Kuhaku's Cover
From photograph, to inking, to final cover
Build
The cover of Kuhaku is made of 2.5mm boards covered in light grey brill #4003 cloth. There is a 2 color matte foil stamp for the word "Kuhaku" in black, and the sun behind the cityscape in red. The dark grey and white of the city scape are printed on the cover using a 2 color silk screen. The binding, printing and production of the book was handled by Oddi Printing in Iceland.
The image for the cover began with the idea of capturing the sprawling, grey landscape that punctuates most arial views of the city. Naturally we ended up choosing Shinjuku -- the archetypal Tokyo sprawl.
Source Image
The source images were shot from the 28th floor of the L-Tower in west Shinjuku. This happens to be the same floor as the Nikon Salon, Shinjuku. This space, by the way, is a great place to go to check out Nikon equipment and view their rotating gallery (they also, amazingly enough, do cleanings of CCDs on digital SLRs and lenses for free). Since the source images were going to be inked over, high resolution pictures weren't necessary. An old sony 3.2 mega-pixel cybershot was used to take the photographs.
The original source image.
Inking
The source images were then taken to Kinkos in Shinjuku station towards the west side to be printed out. These printouts were then taken to Starbucks in Ebisu for several 4 hour long inking sections. It should be noted that as long as you have some coffee, starbucks can be used as a makeshift art studio. Furthermore, inking images on A3 transparent overlays using (insert ink name) is a conversation starter and a stare getter.
Once the images were inked they were scanned and imported into Flash. Flash was used to "trace" the inkings into vector images resulting in the folowing:
After being inked in Starbucks.
Final Cover
This resultant vector image was then cleaned up and manipulated until we arrived at the final cover design:
The final cover.