The first book of the Everything Goes series, On Land, is scheduled to be published on September 13. It's high time I start writing a bit more about this book. The fine folk at Balzer+Bray (an imprint of HarperCollins) have given the go ahead to show the cover. So I thought that I'd start with a bit of a tease before I pull cover off the cover, so to say.
The idea for Everything Goes is "lots." Lots of everything, going. Lots of cars and trucks and trains and bikes and motorcycles, and then in the second and third books, lots of airplanes and helicopters and balloons and rowboats and tugboats and ocean liners and sailboats and you get the idea. I may have written this already, but mixing a little of Where's Waldo and David Macaulay with a lot of Richard Scarry was generally the idea going into this project.
So to that end, I knew that the cover was going to be busy and jammed with a little bit of everything that is in the book. But beyond that idea, I didn't have much.
I started out by drawing what I figured would be a decent basis for the illustration. This would be a traffic jam. Just a mass of vehicles with which I could set into a 10 inch by 12 inch frame and start working.
I used this sketch for the basis for the first sketch.
And then used it as a take-off point for a second sketch. These are the two I first sent to HarperCollins.
Generally, it was agreed that this is a good start. I was asked to try and show different kinds of vehicles that were in the book, like trains and bikes. And the type wasn't working, since Everything was reading as Every Thing. For the second round of sketches, the background illustration was starting to fall into place but the type still wasn't working. I'd became slightly obsessed with getting the type to work as a sign, like a billboard or on the side of the truck.
My editor believed that the treatment for "Everything Goes" should be something that would work on all three books and not necessarily be tied to the illustration itself. I squirmed at this suggestion, though of course she was correct. I knew it was 5% too clever to actually work. You can see the illustration getting a bit more refined as well.
After some prodding, I worked up some sketches for the "logo" as we started calling it.
Now, we were getting somewhere. Here's how the sketch looked with the logo in place.
This is the sketch that got approved, though the logo still went through another round of changes. As a technicality, I made one more iteration of the cover sketch, just to nail down the details before I started inking. Below are the final illustration sketch and logo sketch that led to the artwork, which I shall reveal tomorrow. Stay tuned.
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