This is the cover Marie, Jack and I designed for Don Quixote in class today. At first, we were thinking about drawing the typical scene– Don Quixote holding the shield and the spear on a skinny horse and his servant Sandro on a donkey. But then, it turned out to be really difficult to design a unique one without destroying the theme of the cover, so we decided to show the scene when the priest burned Don Quixote’s knight novels without notifying him.
According to the book, Don Quixote was not supposed to know what happened because people who burned his books told him that, there were never books, but they did only leave some of Don’s collections and hid them in the sealed library. However, we still decided to draw Don Quixote on the left bottom of the cover, waving his hands and legs in bed to show his anger. The fire and the burning books take up most space on the page, because we want it to be Don Quixote’s perspective of witnessing the fire. His fear of losing his books and dream enlarge the size of the fire as if the fire is burning on his heart.
Due to the time limit, we did not have time to write the title on the cover. Our idea was to fill the book title on the bottom right corner. What I like about this cover is that, it is not a typical Don Quixote’s cover. It doesn’t include windmills, or the horse or any of the popular scenes in the story, but it still reveals a certain aspect of Don Quixote’s craziness and the mockery of his knight dream. The burning fire also implies the ending of the story that, his dream to a knight would never come true.
Hi Debroah,
I really like this book cover idea! I like that you scaled the fire on the page based on the symbolic importance of Don Quixote’s fear and of the high stakes of losing his dreams. This is especially significant due to the fact that the story may not have happened at all if Don Quixote hadn’t read those books. They represent the origin of his whimsical thinking and world view, and the base of his inspiration. I wonder what the implications are of burning these texts, if they have become the lens through which he sees his surroundings, entirely occupying his consciousness?
One of the main reasons why I wanted to comment on this post was because when I saw your illustration in class on Wednesday I was incredibly impressed with the way you interpreted the book into your ideal cover. As I had mentioned in class there seems to be three or four key elements that seemed to be found in every other cover we focused on in class, except for yours. While you still had the books, I thought it was incredibly interesting that it was this scene you focused on for the book. I also was surprised that you did not include Don Quixote. Also to follow Julia’s comment above, I agree that while it isn’t the first scene that came to mind for me it is still incredibly important to the story as a whole. The burning of the books represents his fear of losing his dreams, and all that came from those books. I think this was a great cover, and I wanted to compliment your creativity and imagination while creating it.