Yesterday I showed the process leading up to the cover of Everything Goes: On Land. Without further ado or brouhaha, here's the final cover of the book. Click the image to see it quite a bit larger.
The cover design had to be indicative of the work that's in the book, and I do believe it is. Cars and trucks, bikes and motorcycles, buses, construction vehicles, trains, and whatever else made it in the book and on this cover. Vehicles going this way and that way, all kinds of people riding and driving them, and even a friend's blue and white striped Mini Cooper.
Once the final sketch was approved, I use that as the basis to create the inked drawing. I usually try to create my illustrations to the exact size that they'll be printed. Everything Goes is going to be a big book — twelve inches tall and ten inches wide — so this was no problem. I draw the illustration using a big lightbox on nice Strathmore 500 series bristol with watered-down india ink, and use white gouache to carve out areas and add details.
If you take a look at the close-up image below, the wheels of the train, the white outlines of the train windows, the railroad ties, and the wing of the small black bird are examples of where I paint the negative space, or the white areas. When I inked the drawing, the area under the train was solid black. This part of the process is easily my favorite, as it's a real joy to see these details appear and everything come together.
You may also notice that there is no type on the black-and-white line drawing. This is because when I do work like this I always draw the type and add it digitally.
Once these are all complete, they get scanned into the computer where I use Photoshop to color everything and piece it together. When it's complete, I save it as a TIF file and send it to the designer at the publishing house (Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins in the case of Everything Goes).
Everything Goes: On Land is scheduled to be released on September 13. I'm currently working on book two of the series, which is called "In the Air," and which will be published a year later. Lastly, "On the Sea" will come out in 2013. I don't have the covers sketched for either of these two books yet, but they will be similar in idea and business to "On Land." And of course I'll post here about them when they're ready to make their way into the world. Stay tuned!
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