The Last Lie

A new book is out in hardback on August 1st - the follow up to Patricia Forde’s ‘The List’ (published also as ‘The Wordsmith’) which I illustrated a couple of years ago.

This cover was created for Sourcebooks USA, and was made with a combination of large, hand-drawn inky pieces and elements made in Procreate.

 I loved putting it together this way - for me, tools are tools, and I get as much out of slopping inks onto a big sheet of paper as I do creating worlds within Procreate, which I still feel like a novice with, but I’m getting there!

What Goes Up

Out today is this book by Christine Heppermann, for which I made this cover using just ink on paper for Greenwillow Books, USA.

This is a YA story told in prose, an unusual format which lends the book a slightly magical, wistful atmosphere, despite dealing with some heavy topics - secrets, regret, mistakes, break-ups. And the narrator is a teenage spore print collector - which, yes, had me bungee-jumping into an online search too.

Unusually, although I suggested seven or eight different roughs, this cover went to press almost completely unaltered from the rough that was chosen. Always a lovely thing to happen! Made with ink and pencil.

Gold Rush Girl!

I had two concerns before starting this cover:

This was one of those books where I so enjoyed reading the manuscript I was worried about getting too close to it all, and not being able to do it justice.

Second, it had to have ships on the cover. SHIPS. Accurately-drawn, historical ships (a ketch and a brig, to be precise).

I can barely get your average domesticated animal right (unless they need to be deliberately wonky) so this was a bother. However, with the constant feedback of art director Matt at Candlewick Press, the process, although a challenge and a learning curve, was nowhere near as as much of a struggle as I thought it might be.

But this is the kind of stuff I had to study, printed out on many sheets of A3 paper!

 

Set in San Francisco in 1848, the book tells the story of Tori, aka Victoria, who stows away on an arduous sea journey against her father's advice to the new lands where he's looking for gold. She leaves behind a safe, comfortable family home, but pines for adventure; what follows is a richly-detailed story of the real peril, physical hardship and unpredictable adventure she experiences.

The children's clothes had to be pretty bang-on too, so reference was required for those. Thank the lord for Adobe Stock and the internet at large!

 

Aside from the ships - which are really central to the story - details like the never ending rain; the mud, the pathetic tent the family is forced to live in, Tori's big plait, the roaring sea, and building sense of community within the prospectors all needed capturing for the cover. Not to mention the threatening aura of the ship in the background.

All of this was set against what needed to be a faithful representation - as best we could get it, allowing for SOME artistic licence - of the shores of San Fran in the mid 1800s. Check out these detailed images of the camps and areas where the gold prospectors set up their new, and hopefully temporary, homes:

 

The sketching was all done on A2 cartridge paper in pencil, with initial roughs created in my sketchbook. Several ideas were explored:

   

The cover had had a treatment designed already, but it wasn't hitting the mark for its intended middle grade (8-12) audience; a little too serious. The robust characters were key, and I was delighted to be creating all three of them, suggesting different assemblies and poses.

Eventually a sketch was chosen:

We fiddled about a bit with whether Tori should be standing, or sitting and pointing:

       

before going ahead with the process of refining, and colouring it all in:

Perhaps the easiest way to show you THAT bit is to play you the time-lapse! 

Created entirely from this point in Procreate with Apple Pencil and my iPad Pro, here's the full process. Total time was...many hours, spread over a few days:

And here's the finished book, complete with its gold-foiled title! (the hand belongs to art director Matt Roeser, who directed the project) - thanks Matt!)

The book is published on Tuesday March 10th, 2020, and you can get a copy here if you're in the USA, and here if you're in the UK, where it's published a little later, in May.

The Spinster Club

After designing the cover of best-selling YA author Holly Bourne’s latest novel ‘Are We All Lemmings + Snowflakes?’, I was asked by long-term client Will Steele at Usborne Books UK to re-design the covers of The Spinster Club books, including the series branding.

Felt tips, Sharpies, assorted markers and really sharp, very soft pencils were employed to create a dialled-down, doodly look for the covers of this incredibly popular series.

For the first, 'Lemmings', I'd wanted to really emphasise the thread of mental health that runs thought Holly's books, and which has made them so incredibly popular among young readers, by employing some of the habits I know I have when I'm anxious, tense, upset or stressed. 

These filter through into my work like this:

- gripping my pencil till my hand really hurts and my knuckles have gone white

 - clenching my non-drawing hand into a tight ball till it's painful

- going over and over a line till the paper's gone through

- pressing really hard into the paper

- snapping pencil leads

- losing fine motor control over what I'm doing, resulting in clumsy or overbearing marks, lines gone over, smudges and ink blots (usually I want these, but then there are times when I don't)

- thinking everything I've produced is rubbish

- then thinking I'm a giant fraud who can't believe she's managed to kid everyone for this many years.
(This last one is another blog altogether!)

The results were exactly what I wanted, with emotionally-driven marks forming the roughs as I pieced together the elements to make the various options. The inclusion of school paper - lines and grids - felt important, to communicate the setting:

The angry-scrawl made it into the final cover, but with the addition of some more confident looking lettering (less of the Goth) and a neat, hand drawn Holly Bourne which has become Holly's new logo. I was sad this paper scar, didn't make it, as this felt like it summed up a lot about what happens when I'm trying to work and I'm not feeling good about it (it's either this, nor nothing at all, as I just can't work if my brain's feeling seriously knocked off kilter by something):

The rest of the covers were kind of plain sailing once the tone had been set - and in this case, the flavour had been established with previous versions, so it was a case of refreshing and injecting some energy into them, with the same tool - big marker pens and paper!

Look out for the rest of the series making its way onto shelves throughout 2019.