Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
This book was a direct influence on the famous Hunger Games series. It's set in a dystopian Japan that selects a random classroom of pre-teens as tribute to fight to the death. The story is violent, bloody and tragic and I wanted to create a cover that hit that point across at a glance.
I hand did the lettering of the book to make it seem as though the title of the book and it's author was scrawled on its surface in a panicked frenzy by one of the students in the book.
I wanted to stay true to the original color scheme for this cover so I stuck with a stark black cover with the bloody/violent lettering I hand did with red ink. It's minimal but foreboding.
I did a couple extra covers for this book to explore different ideas of eerie violence. For the cover on the right, the girl in the picture has had her eyes covered in blood red ink to remind the reader that innocent kids died in the story. Hopefully the reminder adds weight to the events that transpire within the book. The cover on the left depicts the lettering scrawled on school notebook paper to allude to the fact that all the characters fighting for their lives are school children. The Red and White of Japan are an ominous nod to the books setting.
