Book Cover - Before the Coffee Gets Cold
For this project, apart of SCAD’s ILLU-504 Drawing Strategies class, students were tasked with choosing a favorite book and creating a new book cover. Our illustrations were meant to be imaginative, with strong narrative elements such as characters, furniture, props, etc. We needed to use perspective, silhouette, color, and gesture to demonstrate the narrative. First, I wanted to emphasize the cafe's cozy but wondrous nature through the muted tones and warm atmosphere. The steam from the coffee not only added some movement to the composition but also represented the hot coffee and the journey the customers would take as they utilized the cafe's unique opportunity to travel through time. The character in the scene also represents the women that the book follows.
About the Book:
"In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee—the chance to travel back in time." However, there are rules. Customers must sit in a particular spot, and the trip only lasts as long as it takes before the coffee gets cold.
This story follows four customers that come to the cafe, each wanting to take advantage of the cafe's unique offer. The first customer goes back in time to confront the man who left her, the second customer goes back to access a letter from her husband before his memory is taken by Alzheimer's, the third customer travels back to see their sister one last time, and lastly, the fourth customer travels forward in time to meet her daughter that she didn't get the chance to know.