Designing the book cover for The History of Love was initially not easy. Mainly because I had no idea what to do. I was looking at my drawing tablet wondering what on earth I wanted to draw as I listened to a YouTube video about the Mandela Catalogue. Then I looked up images of the book’s movie adaptation to get inspiration and I found who Leopold’s actor was. Now, while I did not sketch out Derek Jacobi’s face for the book cover, he did hold some inspiration over some of the facial features of my design for Leopold. As for why I chose to have only a white outline for his character design, that is an artistic choice I have made in a previous artwork. The white outline sketch is meant to reflect the person’s inner-self and you can see that Leopold is in a sort of anguish based on his expression. As for the background, that was originally done in black, but to avoid the uncanny valley effect I already had going with Leopold initially, I decided to pay homage to the original book cover by making it into an ocean. An artistically styled ocean, but an ocean, nonetheless. I chose Leopold over the other characters because I felt like he was the best character to reflect the main themes in the story.
I like to be vague when I’m writing sometimes so when I wrote the book synopsis, the entire first paragraph had one main inspiration: Star Wars the Clone Wars. In the beginning of each episode, there's a quote that vaguely ties into the themes of that episode. So, that entire first paragraph of that book summary was full of vague nods to the themes and events that happen within The History of Love.
As for the book analysis, I already knew that I was going to focus on Leopold as he is my favorite character in the story. Taking notes on what I was going to use to write about his connections with Tzedek, Exile, and Zikaron was also very helpful in my writing as it drew a map of what to include within the analysis.
This hasn’t been my first rodeo in terms of a multi-media project. I did one for my War literature class in my senior year of High School. So, all things considered, this wasn’t that much of a challenge for me to do. A lot of the struggles came in the forms of coming up with what to draw and write, which I of course overcame.