Back cover design

Watts and Whiskerton: Sabotage at the Fete Cake Bake (book two) is publishing next week. Here's a little look behind the scenes at the back cover design.

One we're ready to design the back cover the art director will send me a file with all of the words that will be on the back, as well as the space the barcode will take up. It's important not to put any important illustrations under these. And it's best to leave the areas under text as blank as possible.

I then send a selection of sketches to the art director and we decide which one will work best.

Cover ideas

For this book we actually used one of the drawings I'd sent as a possible front cover. The tent provided a nice blank space for the text to sit and the barcode box made a perfect table for the cakes to sit on. We wanted to make sure we saw some of the delicious cakes from the baking competition. These were actually my favourite things to draw.

I will then draw out the chosen design with everything exactly where it going to be. The art director will check this and I will move on the colouring the page.

This is the final image. I wanted to hint at the sabotage by showing the cakes weren't as perfect as the seem at first glance. There's also a sea of cake batter (which will be explained inside the book.) I'm really pleased with the way the cover turned out. The falling bunting frames to text space in a fun way while hinting that something has gone wrong. 

Here's the final cover on the book.

Sabotage at the Fete Cake Bake is published by Piccadilly Press on April 24th and is available for pre-order now. Perfect for detective fans and young bakers. Just ask in your local lovely bookshop. Or you can order by clicking here.

Cover design - Sabotatge at the Fete Cake Bake

For the past few weeks I've been working on the cover artwork for Watts and Whiskerton book 3 (which I have to keep under my detecting hat for now.) Instead I thought I'd show you how the book two cover was made.

The first thing I do is think about what the book is about, and how to show this on the cover. This book takes place at the Little Gossip Fete Bake so I wanted to included baking equipment, a cake, some detective items, and to try and show that something had gone wrong. I make sketches of all my ideas and send them to the art director. Here are the sketches I sent.

The art director will then send me one or two images back that she thinks works well. The other sketches aren't wasted though, for this book one of them was used for the back cover.

This is the sketch we decided would work best for the cover. 

The next step is to draw the image and items at the correct size and to make sure there's room for the text to fit. You'll notice the image has changed slightly. Pearl gets a chance to bake in this book so I thought it'd be fun if she mirrored Watts' costume but with a baking hat instead of a bowler, and a spoon instead of a magnifying glass. I was unhappy about the bunting layout too so I adjusted that.

Once the art director is happy that everything is in place I start the final artwork. Utensils and shelves of equipment were added to fill out the background. I tried a few different expressions on each of the characters and we spent a lot of time perfecting the colours. Here is the final cover.

Watts and Whiskerton: Sabotage at the Fete Cake Bake is publishing in April, but is avaliable to pre-order here. Please support your local bookshops when you can. 

And if you missed their first adventure, Watts and Whiskerton: Buried Bones and Troublesome Treasure is out now. Have a look in your local library or a friendly bookshop near you.

Cover Ideas

 My last post was the cover reveal of my next book, Watts and Whiskerton: Buried Bones and Troublesome Treasure. Here's a little breakdown of how the cover was made.

Usually when you're part way through colouring the insides of a book someone will mention the cover, and you think, 'The Cover?!' Or I do because I never have a vision for book covers until I'm asked to think about it. So when the cover question arises I sit and sketch little thumbnail ideas and I send these to the art director, Dominica, to see if she thinks any of them are worth developing further. Sometimes it's elements for various ideas.

Can you see which one became the cover?

We hadn't yet discussed how the title was going to appear but she soon sent some variations on the Watts and Whiskerton branding for me to choose from, picked some favourite ideas and made some suggestions about moving forward. We'd discussed using a faux quarter binding too (that little decorative strip down the book's edge.)

Then I sent these...

We decided to use the lower left torchlit image but to add some bones and treasure for hints of colour, and I was asked to send some colour ideas. I sent endless variations. Honestly, there were so many. The paw print pattern is used inside the book and we decided this would work nicely for the quarter binding too. Here are a select few of the colour trials.

There were also decisions to be made about Pearl's outline and Watts' suit colour because the insides of the book are limited to black, white and red but on the cover we can do what we want.

 

We picked the blue suit.

Watts and Pearl together.

From then on it's a case of me making the thing properly, asking for suggestions when I get stuck and then adding more until we all agree that it's finished. We decided to contain the Watts and Whiskerton lettering in a frame and removed the house silhouette. They were fighting each other. I added some coins and rose petals to add colour to the lower underground section and we used the red from the inside of the book for the quarter binding. I think it turned out nicely. Here's the final cover...

Watts and Whiskerton: Buried Bones and Troublesome Treasure publishes July 4th 2024 and is available to buy at your local friendly bookshop, just ask them. Online you can buy here.

Pigeon P.I. cover

My second picture book is publishing this week so here's a post about how the front cover was made.  Don't worry, I've spared you the gazillion colour choice screenshots I took!

Back covers are one of my favourite parts of a book.  They have all the fun of the front cover with none of the responsibility.  I usually leave the back cover until the very end and so far they've always been great fun to do.

The back cover means more room for silly jokes and shenanigans.  

For me, the front cover is the hardest part of any book I make because it's the first thing that people see.  It has to invite readers in and tell them a little bit about what they'll get inside but not everything.   You want people to want to pick it up, to be able to see it across a room and equally to be able to read it when it's tiny on their computer screen.   This is probably the part of the book that my art director and I spend most time discussing, sending ideas back and forth, usually over a period of a few days, refining as we go. 

This was an early idea we had but it never made it any further.  We wanted to make sure we introduced both Murray and Vee (pigeon and canary respectively) and also had a little bit of a narrative.  I particularly liked how Vee's shadow put her on the poster beside Murray, foreshadowing things to come.  I forget why we chose not to use it, but I still like it.

Here are some sketch ideas.  I tend to send every little doodle.  I find that drawings I'm not sure about can often spark ideas in other people and we can end up using them for something somewhere.

This was the sketch we thought worked best as an idea.

This image made its way onto the case cover beneath the dust jacket.

Some more ideas for the cover, case cover and a few fonts I liked.


We tweaked the image a few more times to make it into this.  We wanted to keep the noir feel and the implication of danger whilst showing through Vee that this would also be a really fun, silly book too.

The hardest part of this cover was the font.  Compared to Life Is Magic this looked like quite a simple book lettering-wise.  But with five separate character fonts, the background posters and adverts plus my simple* endpapers, there ended up being a lot more. 

(*My endpapers were simple.  I wrote this in an email to my editor.  I forget how simple they were, but at some point I had a great idea which turned out beautifully and was by no means simple after all.)

Anyway, the cover went through several rounds of hand-lettering.  I do a lot of typography for someone who is still very much learning as I go, so my way in is a little like that part in The Shining where Jack Nicholson is typing 'All work and no play make Jack a dull boy' over and over.  Like so...

Once I see something I like I'll do my best to refine it.  We actually settled on a font, a perfectly nice one, but decided it wasn't strong enough.

Back to the drawing board one more time and we cracked it.  I'm so glad we re-did it.  The final lettering turned out really nicely, especially with the shiny gold foil finish.

So shiny!

Pigeon P.I. publishes on March 2nd.

You can read more about the making of it here

Life Is Magic - Cover

If anyone is counting (which I'm obviously not) then you'll be aware that my first picture book is published in March 2016 - which is still so far away!!!

The lovely Booksniffer did a cover reveal a few weeks back and I thought it was about time I put the cover up here.  So here it is in all its glory.

As you can see, it's published by the lovely people at Andersen Press who were very kind and let me draw on every available surface.  I can't show much more for now but I will say that the back cover is pretty sweet, and the super secret cover beneath this cover for the hardback is my absolute favourite.

Below are some of the cover sketches.  

This is a page of early sketches sent to my editor and art director.  We really brightened it up and added a few more mischievous rabbits but the overall idea isn't that far removed from the final image.    

There is a lot of hand lettering in the book.  Once the first page was finished I think I realised how important the lettering was, it really informed the look of the book for me so we wanted to carry that over onto the cover.  

Evidence that I'm left handed and have not yet learned how not to smudge an image

Favourite cover bunny

These bunnies do incredible work...or so we tell them

I haven't chronicled my epic star drawing yet but believe me I drew a lot of them.  Last count was something in the region of...65392...that's a lie, but there were a bunch.

You can pre-order Life Is Magic here or you can be very, very patient and buy it in a lovely bookshop.

Book covers

Whilst I'm getting on with other things I thought I'd display

 my entries for this years Puffin and Penguin design competitions.  

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Still busy making dummy books and storyboards which is becoming a major case of 'nothing to see here folks!  Move it along.' So this is my entry for last years Penguin Design competition-which I sadly didn't win. But it was fun to do.