Jane Morris, an inspiring lady - A book cover project!
Greetings my dear readers! Today I’d like to share a book cover illustration project inspired by Jane Morris, the amazing embroidery specialist married to William Morris and muse to the preRaphaelites
Hello, and welcome to Greetings from Somewhere in the Wild! I’m Ine Beerten and I’m an artist and nomad, originally from Belgium. Usually you can find me in a wild place somewhere in the world but currently I’m back in Belgium recovering from a knee fracture. However I’ll be back on the road later this year, in the mean time, please subscribe if you’d like to receive my illustration explorations in your mailbox!
Hello everybody!
Last week I subscribed to Jehane’s Golden Thread. This is a newsletter for artists by illustration agent Jehane with weekly creative prompts. My intention was to just see what it was about and occasionally join in create some art inspired by the prompts when I have the time and the prompt sparks an idea…
The inspiration in my mailbox
Last week’s prompt was a painting of Jane Morris by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, it was the last prompt for the Heritage Garden theme in Jehane’s Golden Thread. I’m sad I missed the rest of the theme but very glad I still caught the last prompt!
There’s something about Jane Morris and those paintings of her by Rossetti that feels very close to my heart. It’s probably because I’ve been told more than once that I remind people of those paintings. I have similarly voluminous wavy reddish hair (it’s cut short in a bob now, but it used to be long like hers in the paintings and mine is more of a strawberry blond, rather than the deep red in the paintings) and a similarly pronounced chin and pointy nose…
So I right away knew I had to do something with this!
The idea
One of my goals for this year is to get into book cover illustration work. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while now and I think my greeting card illustration skills, hand lettering and recent landscape and portrait skills could all be combined for creating beautiful book covers. I just haven’t really done it yet!
So I’ve been wanting to create some portfolio pieces so I can show potential book cover clients what I can do and thought it would be fun to create a cover for a potential biography of Jane Morris.
For a long time people seem to focus on the fact that she was the wife of William Morris and the beautiful muse to the pre-Raphaelite painters but she was a very talented and skilled embroidery artist who deserves the recognition for her own work, so I wanted to really feature something with embroidery on the cover.
I did a bit of research, found some old black and white pictures of her and looked at more paintings of her. I found some examples of her embroidery, also a lot of embroidery in collaboration with her daughter May who became an amazing embroidery artist herself.
Here’s a little mood board with some of the images I found…
The sketch
I made a rough sketch first of what I wanted the cover to look like. I wanted her portrait on the front and her name hand lettered / embroidered. I decided to feature that pomegranate that she’s holding in the painting on the back of the cover and created a fairly simple symmetric floral embroidery pattern. And I added some embroidery accoutrements in the corners. And then I took those floral embroidery elements and repeated them on the front.
At this point I wasn’t quite sure yet how I would make the embroidery look stylistically, whether it would be more a painterly version of it or a more realistic embroidery look. I just thought I’d experiment a bit and figure it out.
And here’s the result
In the end it took me a few hours of playing around in Artstudio Pro to figure out how I wanted to do the embroidery. I had some digital brushes that looked a bit like embroidery but the effect wasn’t quite as nice as I had hoped. I realised it was missing some depth. And I discovered I could create that by adding a little bit of an embossing and shadow effect on my embroidery layers.
I think the result looks quite realistic and I’m happy with how the portrait turned out. I based the colour palette for the cover on the painting by Rossetti in the prompt and I think it turned out really well!
What did you think? Would you buy a book with a cover like this? Do you like the embroidery effect?
Let me know in the comments!
Thanks so much for reading!
Cheers from Antwerp in Belgium!
Ine
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It's amazing Ine, loved the embroidery effect 🤩 and it was really nice to read and see a bit of all your process behind the final result. Do you prefer Artstudio Pro to Procreate?