Virginia "Ginny" McClure, Artist & Designer

C O V E R . A R T

Since I think most people locally have already seen the Community Bulletin covers in person (some below for those who never saw the magazine), I thought I would show the covers that for one reason or other were bumped and being saved for the next year. Below: the top 2 are ones that never were. I set the May/June cover to the theme of getting ducks in a row, then it was bumped for Vince Dooley to go with the story about his retirement. The July-August cover was changed to have the calendars (new feature at that time) so I bumped all the other art so as not to get things too busy. It is possibly my favorite of all: it has the newer logo that I designed and a nice weave of dark and light greens, boldly offset by the watermelon. I was just on the brink of giving the melon slice a bit of a turn counterclockwise, but I liked the way it acted as a sort of bracket for the content.

I think these 2 covers document the kind of thought process that I put into something. First I set a theme: below left it was "Summer Camps/ Got your ducks in a row?" All the other elements are necessary and informative but the theme of summer and camp plus the pun of the ducks in a row dominates and the overall outdoorsy, woodsy relaxed landscape sets the mood for vacation time (it looks a lot like my landscape paintings, see www.virginiamcclure.com). For the cover on the right I had the golden oldie song "Summertime" on and it is a medley and weave of tones, and then, what says summer better that watermelon?

The March/April issue (above left) was one of the most popular. People really picked it up and it drove a lot of traffic to our web site. The background is a montage of daffodils with all the foliage and even the black channel removed -- just an exhuberant mix of orange and yellow on white, and the kids on the cover were a real draw. I have found that our main demographic was young and female - it was something mother and daughter could agree on.

November (center) has a similar, but more somber/autumnal feel with the leaf art and the Thanksgiving dinner photo, and December (right) looked like a gift package complete with drop shadows under the bow. Notice there was no mailing label: we went to having distribution points only at that time. Jim Rodgers, the publisher, says if we had started out doing what we were doing the last couple of months, we could still be in business. (I was his design partner) As it was, the expense was mounting and the competition fierce. Jim had a vision, which I came to share, of having a clean cut publication appropriate for the whole family (not to scold some publications that run nasty things you wouldn't want young children to see) that would have the warmth and feel of a real community, rather than something grudgingly tossed out by the newspaper or something that was transparently a vehicle for advertising.

God bless the advertisers who shared our vision and supported the Community Bulletin!

Contact: e-mail: vmcclandpaint@aol.com • Ph.: (706) 757-3778