All the blue inks and crayons.

One of my new book covers out today is 'August Isle' by Ali Standish.

*Actual* crayons were used in the creation of this cover for Harpercollins USA, which was almost a collage (physical and digital) of many parts inked and pencilled in to create the deep sea and the island, before becoming a one-take ink-wash illustration.

The images show the finished book and some of the cover ideas generated along the way to the final - I was very much in favour of the geometric look, with straight lines and clean cuts to the collage - the lighthouse along the way was first of brutalist design, then concrete - but the softer look was preferred for the age group, and I'm very happy with the way it turned out. That lettering was flung straight onto the cover completely untouched! Which is always a joy.

A  much softer island and its greenery won out in the end, with what's become my current trademark (which means I'll have to retire it soon!) - a 'statement moon' - and my age-old bleach-technique stars pecking a threatening sky. The little girl and boat were drawn in ink and pencil, and cast into shadow for the final, wraparound cover.

And look! I drew a turtle without embarrassing myself!

Thanks to Joel Tippie for superb art direction on this one.

The Turnaway Girls

Published this week, the new novel by Hayley Chewins is a beautiful, rather stirring book about what happens when you try to silence girls' voices.

South African-based author Hayley set her novel in the fictional Blightsend, where singing is not allowed, so the girls (led by 12-year-old Delphernia) sing in secret. Outside, The Masters - men - make music. Indoors, the women and girls turn that music into gold - a process they called 'shimmering'. The bleak landscape of Blightsend (great name!) and the curling, far-reaching sounds of the girls' golden voices needed capturing for this cover, so a woven network of musical staves was created as a centrepiece in which Delphernia herself stands, arms to the moon and flanked by her 'marble' birds.

There were relatively few roughs got this cover - for me, anyway, since I usually send quite a few - which made the job of narrowing down easier. Working with art director Pam at Candlewick Press, we quickly established the bits we liked via a series of looser-than-usual thumbnails, with notes. This has proved a great way of getting all the ideas out quickly, without committing too many hours to a version which might not prove to be 'the one':

Once we'd dissected these ideas, I worked up a shortlist in more detail. At the core of this cover was to be the music, the birds, Delphernia herself, and the foreboding landscape. The music was realised through a tree-like structure made of staves, golden leaves pinging from each 'branch (we did not yet now we would be treated to gold foil!)

The winner was chosen, and thus began the process of working up the separate components. Though I sometimes create artwork 'in one take' - as a single piece of completed artwork - which I love - this is is my most common way of putting a cover together, due to the probability of having to make adjustments and micro-movements as we progress the cover, and the need to tweak background colours throughout, for optimised reproduction.

Watch the time-lapse of this bit happening! (go FULL SCREEN to enjoy)

All of the original artwork - now in the proud hands of the author Hayley - was created in acrylic-based drawing inks on thick cartridge for the most part; the stony buildings of Blightsend were probably my favourite bit to do though, on fat, knotty watercolour board. 

I got to completely make up a fictional landscape and gnarly sea! Spiky it is then...

My vast inky sky, made of five shades of blue ink on A2 paper, were added to anchor the details, with a collaged ink-wash-moon...

And, compiled in Photoshop over many hours and with countless (labelled) layers of all the ink work, is the completed cover - the US edition, and the very ethereal UK version due out in January.

Thank you to Candlewick press for inviting me to do this cover...and going all-out on the gold foiled cover! I hope Hayley is already writing a sequel...

A Room Away From The Wolves

Nova: a transient astronomical event that causes the sudden appearance of a bright, apparently 'new' star, that slowly fades over several weeks or many months. 

When I heard Nova Ren Suma's name, I thought it had to be a fabulous, eerie pseudonym, with its syllabic simplicity and its space-age middle name. I didn't even know the gender, at first, of this new author whose cover I would be working on - but I knew right away a) they weren't about to fade away! and b) I was fascinated. 

The appearance of Nova's new book 'A Room Away From The Wolves' is far from sudden - it took her a long time to write - but it has proved a sparkling new addition to the richly-layered teen fiction landscape. Without giving too much away, this is a ghost story with, as the cliché goes, a mighty twist, but set far away from any Burtonesque, Disney or period environment; the characters existing, instead, in modern-day downtown Manhattan. With references to a key character's former life in the 90s, this is a story that both a young reader and a 'grown'-up' can identify with chronologically as well as emotionally, with its themes of belonging, friendship, abandoned dreams, broken relationships and accepting who, and ultimately what, you are - and what you never will be.

I read the book first as a manuscript, which is always interesting because at this stage of the process,  the author is still making notes and fine-tuning. The finished copy which I read many months later did indeed differ from the original draft, and that's part of the reason I love doing books so much; getting that early peer into the writer's machine, watching the head-scratching, the changes of tense, notes to the Editor, syntax tweaks, even chicanes of storyline as the author changers her mind completely.

Thus, although a strong and simple story - one which I might add is crying OUT to become a film - this was a tough cover to crack. It could not be too overtly ghosty; such an approach is easy to make 'silly'. It couldn't be too literal; there are a lot of ethereal concepts to ponder, and a suspension of disbelief is required for the key events to make sense, but at the same time, the sense of place was important. Bina, the protagonist, couldn't be portrayed too specifically, as one person's vision of a central character is always different from the next - and Bina is, interestingly, somehow described both thoroughly, and ambiguously enough to toggle-switch-on the reader's own pencil of the imagination.

So what to do? Well, the art director, who I'd worked with on Dreadful Young Ladies And Other Stories, wanted another book that was beautiful. We knew this was going to enjoy special finishes. The book had to be very strong on a book shelf; Nova's previous novel The Walls Around Us had set a precedent there. 

The location gave me the initial starting point for the cover, along with the foggy cool of an early winter evening in New York:

 

But it was an omnipresent dark opal that gave us our central motif, and allowed the next round of roughs to emerge: I created a pile of opals in ink, and some big pages of hand-lettered titles, and used them to generate not-too-directed ideas in fast succession:

These also gave us our colour cues - the purple! Throughout, as is my usual process, I was adding title after title in different inked letters - avoiding the 'goth' and the 'romantic' traps, neither of which were right for this novel.

Then we needed to consider the geography. If you've ever been to Manhattan, you'll know how big the sky is, since you're always looking up at the skyscrapers. But if you can get across the water from Manhattan Island for some perspective, and look back out towards it from say Brooklyn or New Jersey - the sky is vast, and the city glows and hums. It positively sparkles - stars, buildings thrusting upwards, the occasional firework, with flashes of blue light for emergencies. This is where our opal needed to...explode into life. And so we tried a few iterations:

    

In these versions, our opal shards were to be finished in some kind of iridescent or metallic varnish; maybe even a holographic look, to truly make the cover twinkle. But then, Art Director Laura saw what we had been missing in the many roughs we were discussing - the central lettering, the mesmeric skyline against the moon, the purple glowering of the all-ink sky - and the window light. I'd added a single, tiny one in the lower buildings (for reasons you'll learn upon reading!) - and suddenly, there it all was.

With a little fine tuning here and a bit of preening there, the cover was before us. And this is the one it went to press with, on flesh-feel, pearlescent stock, which allows the lettering and the moon to glimmer through:

The back has a hand-written 'blurb' (no hand-lettering style fonts here - this is the real deal):

Watch the iridescence as the book moves in the light! (shady iPhone vid):

I am as delighted with this cover as it's possible to be, and I know that Nova is too. You can enjoy Nova's lively, conversational promotion of the book by following her on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook - and to get a copy of the book, go here.

And if you're in the US, you can catch her one one of her book tour dates:

Thank you Nova, and Laura Williams, ever-patient art director!