I was looking for a title around my house to interpret a cover (for a workshop I had been offered for Book Day), and I chose “Poet in New York”.
I started to reread it at that moment (I hadn’t read Lorca since school), and I was hooked.
I wrote down what all this universe and symbolism, so magical and unmistakable, suggested to me.
I tried combining different very simple symbols (hands, eyes, flames, plants…) and in this way I was creating my own illustrated universe: fish with the crest of a cock, insects inside a flower-shaped flame, knives that are also crowns, hands that are flowers that are fists that are wings, eyes that observe and analyse life and death, worms that are rivers, and birds and plants and moons…
And so the idea was born: How many combinations of all these shapes and letters of the title are there?
I made several tests modifying illustrations, sizes and position of each element.
The game would be endless, but I focused on defining these 3 options:
After playing with 3 covers, I worked on just one of them to apply colour and finish my own cover version of “Poet in New York”.
This is the moodboard from which I worked, and the colour palette that Lorca’s universe suggested to me.
Colour back cover
As a result of this personal project, the idea for a creative covers workshop that I will give on the occasion of the Book Day in the Library “Tomás y Valiente” of Fuenlabrada, in “La Casa del Lector” of Madrid on the occasion of the Book Day, and at my studio in Calle Pez on Friday 14th April.
