How to draw a book cover

For this week I thought I’d show the behind the scenes origin of the book cover.

I was so excited when I was asked to draw the cover! I was thinking of an epic type of movie poster style cover (think of Star Wars!) and was asked to send a rough layout showing what I was thinking. So I sent this.

See how my drawings start out? The idea is supposed to be Darcy standing there surrounded by the swamp animals with the other characters of the book in the background.  It was suggested though that something a little simpler might be better and Cate (the amazing editor of the book) liked the idea of Darcy and Jumpy both jumping together.

I cant find my initial scribbles for those but she liked one of them so I went ahead and refined it to this!

Still not quite right though. Can you see what’s different? There’s 2 key things.

The first problem? Too many frogs! I draw all this on the computer and had the frogs on a separate ‘layer’ which means if i turn off the layer the frogs disappear. Poor frogs. But its ok! They ended up on the back cover of the book! Hooray!

 

Which one do you like? I like the yellow guy myself with the tongue.

So the frogs are gone and the drawing is set. Time to start colouring.  First I did what’s called ‘flats’ and added the basic colour to the picture. (fun side note – I’ve worked on comic books over the last several years doing this. I’ve got to work on Superman, Spider-man, The Avengers, Batman and more! Yay!)

 

And THEN finally put the lines back in and add the shadows and lighting and stuff like that..I kept the background transparent so we could put ANY colour behind it. Just imagine the picture is on a sheet of glass that we can put on top of any coloured piece of paper.

Besides no background colour can you guess what the last difference is? Darcy’s eyes! Apparently she looked kind of scary and looking at her like that she DOES look kinda weird I think. So I popped some real eyes on her, added a background and voila! (Hey guys, I didn’t add all the words and stuff – some other fine folks at Fremantle Press did that. Didn’t they do an awesome job with it?)

 

Phew! And that’s how the cover was drawn! Stay tuned next week where I go through how EVERY SINGLE DRAWING IN THE ENTIRE BOOK! WAS DONE…maybe not..  should hopefully post the very first piece of fanart for Darcy Moon and the deep-fried frogs! Exciting!