The Silent Willow - Book Cover Design

"The Silent Willow" is a book cover design that marked a significant milestone: it was my submission for the FOSSEE (Free/Libre and Open Source Software for Education) Summer Fellowship 2020 selection round, and it helped me get selected!

The Challenge

This was my first attempt at designing a book cover. I had to quickly learn about technical printing requirements like bleed area, margins, and safe zones.

But the real challenge was the hardware and input device:

• Hardware: My trusty old Windows 10 laptop (4th Gen i3, 4GB RAM).
• Input: A standard mouse. No graphics tablet.

"Why pen tool? Why not brush tool? Because I only had a mouse and if you ever used MS Paint, you know exactly why."

The Process

The design features a girl standing under a willow tree.

1. Concept: My sister, @hope_dreamin, hand-drew the original concept sketch.
2. Digitization: I used that sketch as a reference and manually traced/drew the shapes using the Pen Tool in GIMP.
3. Shading: Creating depth and shadows required hours of experimenting with layers and opacity, given the limitations of mouse input.

This project proved that with patience (approx. 16 hours of editing!), professional-grade art can be created using open-source tools like GIMP, even on modest hardware.