Happy Friday everyone! Today I have a new blog tour post for you, about Dinosaur Pie by Jen Wallace. Illustrator Alan O’ Rourke has described the process of making the cover, which I found super interesting and hope you do too!
The original brief was to illustrate a cover for Dinosaur Pie, written by Jen Wallace, that would be both bright and colourful to fit in with the range of award-winning young reader books from Little Island. The Etherington Brothers have some brilliant resources on cover design and composition that really kick-started my idea process
After sketching out a few ideas, I collected together what I felt were the strongest to send to the Little Island team, along with some explanation text just in case they could not interpret my scrawls!
The Little Island team felt option #1 gave a little more detail to draw readers into the story. They wanted to see that developed further. In addition, they wanted to try a more literal interpretation of the cover with an actual pie made with Dinosaur. It of course made me think of Desperate Dan from the Dandy comic so I was all on for trying that.
For round two, I developed those ideas in more detail.
It is important to note that it is not my role to design the title text for the design. That will be done later by the designer. However, I need to keep the text in mind and leave enough space so I always work with placeholder text.
The decision was made to proceed with #3, the gang running across the city against a moon / pie.
In the original thumbnail the gang contained a much wider cast of characters from the book but that was greatly simplified in this version.
You can see in this sketch the main shapes of the cover composition. My goal is to draw and focus the eye to the title and the main action.
You can see in this video how the line work came together for the cover before I moved to colour.
I tried a load of colour combinations for the cover.Originally I went in a more painterly direction with the following light and dark suggestions.
I tried a load of colour combinations for the cover.Originally I went in a more painterly direction with the following light and dark suggestions.
But they didn’t suit the target market the publisher was going for. So with a little course correction, I sent over the following three colour combinations in a more vibrant comic colour style.
Really helpful to me, at all stages of the process is looking at how (if) the cover will stand out alongside other books on the bookshop shelf.A quick photo when passing through Waterstones and I mocked up each book cover on the shelf to see how it would look alongside today’s books.
In Little Island the full team gets some input on the cover, including the author, editorial, sales and marketing.
The consensus was to go with colour / cover #2. The blue and yellow night-time shot.
From there it was on to final artwork and even then, my inner designer couldn’t resist a little final suggestion of some title text design.
Then it is over to the wonderful real designer Niall McCormack @hitoneie who must pull all the design together and make it all work as an actual book. Once you see it all come together with the internal page titles you thank your lucky stars to work with talented people who know their stuff.
All images © Alan O’Rourke
How to get in touch with Alan, where to find him online:
Web: https://www.spoiltchild.com/
Socials: @AlanORourke
Thank you so much for reading! I’d love to hear about some of your favourite covers in the comments below
Amy xx
Golden Books Girl 