As an assignment for school we got to make a bundle of 3 books, each with a cover and they also had to have a box to make it like a book collection. I already knew that I wanted to do something that included dresses and I wanted it to have a hint of asian culture in it.

I will now explain what I did in my process:

First I sketched 3 characters that I wanted to put on the bookcovers, I did that in Photoshop with the non-photo blue pencil and using a pad to draw it.

After I finished my sketches, I exported them as JPG images and placed each of them individually in an illustrator file. I used them as a template and I overdrew the lines and added a background using the paintbrush tool on 0,25 width. 

After that I coloured them using the blob brush and I kept making new layers under the layer with the lines so that I could always see them. I kept certain parts such as the body and the clothing in seperate layers, which made it easier to colour them because if I would add a shadow, I didn't have to worry that it would overlap with something else in the illustration.

I did the same with the background, except that I put the lines and the colouring both under the layers of the character in the illustration. Then I also don't have to worry about drawing over the character and it will eventually save you a lot of time.

After I was done with the illustrations, I exported them as PDF and made a new file in InDesign. I actually didn't make spreadpages, it's one landscape oriented page of 

282x185mm with 3mm bleed. (You can use guidelines to make it easier to see the centre of the page.)

Then I decided how ''big'' my book was gonna be, and by that I mean the width of the space that is gonna have pages inbetween. (If you want, you can just make a rectangle and place it in the middle.)

When I knew what the titles were gonna be, I started to play with fonts, colours, sizes and places of diffrent words in diffrent colours. When I was happy with how that looked, I matches the colours of the typography to the colours of the 3 diffrent illustrations. As you can see, I matched the colours of each whole book to the colours of the illustrations.

Because that was part of the assignment, I also added a barcode, another code and the logo of our school, SintLucas, to it.

(Because I didn't write an actual book I did add some fake text on the back just so it does look like a real book.)

Since I wanted it to have a hint of ''asian culture'' I decided that the title was gonna be ''Little Gisha'', it's refers to geishas but I wanted to do a little wordplay with it. I gave all of them the same main tittle but they each have a unique secondary title under it. In my head the books would be about 3 diffrent girls who are kind of going trough the same things and also things that have to do with the geisha culture and I'd want it to be a bit in history and not a modern time.

When the digital work was done, I printed the 3 bookcovers on SRA3 papers.

Then I made 4 creases on each cover, which will help the cover bend obviously.

So I folded the papers with the covers on it in a way that one side of the cover is folded away from you.

 Then I put glue on the inside of the paper, but only on the middle part and I waited a bit for the glue to attach to the paper and then I chose a fitting amount of A4 sized papers (that were still attached to eachother) and I put it onto the glued part of my paper and carefully folding the other side so it ''hugs'' the A4 papers.

Then it was time to let the glue dry, I put a wooden plate on the glued cover and on top of that a heavy object and let it dry over night.

The next day it was ready to be cut, because the cover was printed on a much bigger paper (purposely, because the book pages are smaller than A4 sized paper and else the cutting would be rather messy)

I used a cutting machine to cut the book precisely and neat and I did that with all 3 of them.

For the box I used a picture of a blossom that I made once and the same typography as on the bookcovers but in a more natural colour. On the back I put the covers as well and each had a bit of fake text like it was a tiny discription of each book from the collection. 

For the cutting made a document that was fitting for the 3 books together. I made a 

zund-file that cut the book that I would fold and glue together afterwards.

I hope you enjoyed reading this and that it may have been helpful to you in any way!