Exercise: Making a Mockup

For this exercise, I used a cover I made a few years ago for a science fiction story/ concept I had created in 12th grade.

The original cover had colour and including the photo of me. However, at this point, it wasn’t really working anymore, so I switched to a uniform grey colour scheme. Moreover, this is the final edit for a number of different edits, including changes to the title, subtitle, and placement.

I wanted my cover to be printable on an A4 size sheet, so I used a small Japanese learning book I had as reference for the dimensions (9.4 cm x 14 cm) and support for the mockup.

Printing was a huge pain because there were bleed problems while printing on an A4 size sheet, because by default there is a mechanism that prevents printers from printing an image and letting it touch the edge of the paper, thus reducing the size of the image to fit within the printing limits of the printer.

After about 13 tries I went to a printing shop, since all shops had by now reopened, and got the entire thing printed on an A3 size sheet. However, there were problems here too as there were white gaps between each section of the cover. Eventually, I got it all right.