On the left is the original cover, on the right is my illustration.

This project was part of a class project and required choosing a book with a cover whose illustration badly needed updating. I chose the book, "Shrieks at Midnight: Macabre Poems, Eerie and Humorous," compiled by Sara Westbrook Brewton and John E. Brewton, published in 1969. The original illustration for the cover was a woman putting a human head through a meat grinder. The inner illustrations only went downhill from there. The pictures were done in crude line drawings filled with yellow and the cover was usually printed in a sickly orange or green. After reading the book, I chose to focus on the fact that many of the poems inside were actually taken off of tombstones. I wanted it to be reminiscent of telling scary stories at a sleepover or around a campfire. I used a graveyard scene with lots of shadows
and a black cat to give the scene an eerie feeling and included some of the funnier poems to add some humor. The font on the cover was chosen because it reminded me of nails on a chalkboard.


From Shrieks at Midnight:

Inscription on a monument in France, dedicated to an army mule:
"In memory of Maggie,
who in her time kicked two colonels, four majors,
ten captains, twenty-four lieutenants,
forty-two sergeants, four hundred thirty-two other ranks
and a class-A bomb."


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