The Return of Sherlock Holmes

In this previous post I had a chat with illustrator Mike Topping about his cover illustrations for the new Sherlock Holmes series from Penguin. He worked closely with designer Coralie Bickford-Smith on this project and I thought it would be really interesting to get them to describe the working process from both the illustrators and designers point of view.

And they kindly agreed!

Over to you Mike and Coralie…

MT: As a fan of these books it’s bugged me for years that the visual identity of Holmes has become this caricature with a deerstalker hat and a ridiculous curved pipe. It’s something that bears little relation to the character in the books and yet it’s slapped onto everything like some sort of lazy branding. So my first thought was to steer well clear of the usual props. The second was to get away from the stuffy Victorian drawing-room feel that a lot of Holmes imagery gets stuck in. The stories cover a lot of ground – as well as murder, there are spy mysteries, hell-hounds and vampires (sort of). Holmes himself is a drug addict, and as handy with fists and pistol as he is with a magnifying glass, so there’s plenty of stuff to work with.

CBS: That sensibility fitted nicely with my main concern, which was making these covers exciting. I’d just designed Penguin’s series of boys’ own books – classic adventure stories with retro illustrations on the covers – and I wanted to bring Holmes to that same audience. The other concern was the quantity of work involved. The boys’ own books were thematically linked but quite varied in content so I was able to use use several different illustrators and still make it work as a series. With Holmes, the style had to be totally consistent. So from doing six books with four illustrators, I went to doing eight books with one, which made me very conscious of the time constraints. With that in mind I suggested that we use nineteenth century engravings of the type found in Dover Books collections as the basis for the covers – they have the right period feel and would save time.

MT: This was the first rough, using found images. There was a surprising amount of stuff available that I could use to highlight the exciting, adventurous side of the stories, such as the chap with the harpoon which fit nicely with the story Black Peter. With some alterations I was able to make the images – originally created for some entirely different purpose – fit the stories quite closely (for example, changing the face of the woman on the bike turned her into the nervous protagonist of the solitary cyclist). Then it was a case of arranging them all in some kind of unified design. I took my cue for combining different scenes onto one image from movie posters, and drew the silhouette of Holmes behind the bullet-shattered glass to tie the whole thing together.

CBS: I found this all too crazy and lacking focus; I wanted the pieces to fit together nicely and smartly but it was all the ideas thrown onto the page at once.

MT: Here I added colour and texture, adjusted the scale and made the type more prominent in an effort to beef up the excitement and make the whole thing more punchy.

CBS: It still wasn’t really working. Time to reign Mike in and tell him nicely that he could not have every idea on the cover and some had to be sacrificed. We were working on several of these titles simultaneously and coming up against the same problem, so it was becoming clear that the original idea of collecting old images together wasn’t going to do the trick. It’s a difficult part of my job saying “I don’t like that, lets go back a few steps and rework the idea”, but sometimes it has to be done.

Fortunately there was something really interesting emerging with the early cinema poster look, but it needed following through more completely in order to work. So the found images were ditched (mostly – there are a couple that integrated well with their surroundings and made it through to the final covers). For this cover, I decided we should declutter the image and focus on the silhouette and bullet hole as the strong central graphic element, with just one foreground element.

MT: I tried out that arrangement using one of the found elements – the old bookseller, who in the title story turns out to be Holmes in disguise – but it just didn’t work dynamically enough with the background image. What it needed, I reckoned, was Watson with his gun at the ready. Changing tack at this stage meant saying goodbye to a lot of work already done, which can obviously be frustrating, but Holmes was a dream project and I was fanatical about getting it right. I was also happy to move away from the constraints of compiling existing images and get my teeth into creating something new.

Portrait of the artist as a detective’s sidekick.

MT: The self timer on my camera became an invaluable tool at this stage of the project. There’s some or all of me somewhere in most of these covers – I was the cheapest and most available model I could find. Here I am looking rather foolish with nothing in my hand.

MT: And here I am after some work with computer and pencil, gun in hand and hat on head (whole new head, in fact – my own gruesome mug being more suited to the twisted corpse on A Study in Scarlet). With only two main elements to accommodate in the illustration I was able to make a much more satisfying composition and incorporate the type in a more interesting way, creating a lot more impact.

CBS: Now that we had a really strong layout, it was just a question of choosing the right colours to make it jump off the page. Each of the covers has two Pantones, and along with old movie posters I looked at all kinds of things, from stamps to matchboxes to get the right combinations.

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The Return of Sherlock Holmes, is one of a series of eight Holmes titles published this year by Penguin.
Designer – Coralie Bickford-Smith (www.cb-smith.com)
Illustrator – Mike Topping (aka Despotica, www.despotica.com)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 9:26 am and is filed under Books, Illustration, Step-by-steps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.