If you follow me or the fantastic Stuart White on Instagram or Twitter, you may have seen our exciting cover reveal announcement last week! Above you can see the final cover for Ghosts of Mars, a new novel written by Stuart and illustrated by me, design based on an extremely useful plan put together by Stuart (more on that later). I thought I might use this week’s newsletter to go into a bit of detail about the process we went through putting it together. Firstly, I wanted to talk about how I got the job. I LOVE designing and illustrating covers. Especially for middlegrade books. So my website is full of fake #notabook books (see for yourself!) which I have created in the hope of attracting work in this area. I’ve been working on this for a long time, and will always put myself forward to any work in this area hoping one day I will be able to create a real cover for a real book! So when I saw a post on the SCBWI British Isles Facebook page, by someone called Stuart asking for illustrators that might want to work on his cover, to get in touch with their portfolios.
I had heard of this Stuart White fellow, as he is the force behind Write Mentor. Write Mentor is an incredible resource for writers of children’s fiction. And I have used their mentor services and joined a workshop a couple times during my modest journey into writing. So I was really keen to get this job. I sent a link to my website and chose a few of my cover illustrations to showcase, and to my surprise, Stuart offered me the job! This was extremely exciting. I passed on Stuarts contact info to my agent and they arranged the details, while Stuart and I discussed the fun stuff. Stuart needed the full cover art and design, as well as a spot illustration of the two main characters.
Stuart had a clear vision for the cover. And as I hadn’t read the story, I was happy to follow his direction. Above you can see the initial mock up he put together for me. The main character, Eva, would be front and foremost on the cover. She would need to be in a white, sterile colony base, with the Martian landscape behind her. The window would be split into three panels. The ghosts on the left, the rest of the colony in the middle, and signs of an oncoming dust storm to the right. The snake in the foreground was also an important detail to include. I was excited to draw all these elements and get them working as a scene. I had certainly never drawn a Martian landscape before!
I decided the first job should be to design the characters, starting with Eva Knight, the main character. She would be small and slight, but fierce and determined. Her hair was wild hair like fire, pointing up towards the sky. She would be holding a large, glowing Excalibur-style sword. As Eva had diabetes, Stuart asked me to include an insulin pump over the suit. She also had Lichtenberg scarring across her skin from an electrical accident. Had you noticed all these details? The story was for older kids - the interior book would not be illustrated - so I needed to ensure my character designs would appeal to older children.
Based on the requirements above, I created four rough options for what Eva could look like. I played around with body size, face shape, limb width etc, while trying to still include each of the points that would make Eva, Eva. Stuart said he immediately saw Eva in option 2, with a few changes, such as the hair from option 4, and some slight tweaks to the sword.
Above you can see the final character design that would be included in the cover. I was then ready to create a rough design for the front cover.
I sketched out a basic plan and knew I would need a large Mars landscape for the very background, which I could place the interior colony and al the details on top of. The Martian landscape would also work as a background for the back cover of the book.
Above shows the background I created. Scenes are not my strong point, and this was a very intimidating task! I spent a lot of time watching tutorial after tutorial about different ways I could approach something so daunting, but nothing seemed quite right. So in the end, I leaned into what I was good at, and just drew how I usually do. I relied on my line work to anchor the image, and used my usual brushes for shadows and texture. I was really happy with the final image and I sent it to Stuart, who seemed happy too.
I then spent some time creating a rough sketch for the final cover. After a few composition changes, this is where we ended up. So the next job was to finalise the remainder of the illustration, then I could take a look at the typography. I had an idea in my head about what I wanted to do with the title. I imagined the T of ghost as the sword and the S of Mars as the snake, so I mocked it up to see if it would work with the rest of the cover.
As you can see from this, although the idea is pretty cool, the cover is WAY too busy. Two snakes was one snake too many, was the decision. I also sent this version to my amazing critique friends, Illoguild (do you follow them? You really should - go follow them!) who pointed out a few issues, like the sword looking a bit too much like a religious cross. Critique groups really are the best for this sort of thing - spotting things that are right in front of you that you just can’t see! So I ditched the snakey S and worked out a way to make sure the sword was more sword-like. I also made a small change to the illustration, as I noticed the chairs were standing out too much, as the contrast between the colour of the chairs and the rest of the interior scene was too great. I wanted Eva to stand out the most, not the chairs.
This was the final design for the title of the book, and the small changes seemed to make a real difference. We were happy!
Preorder your copy here
Coming soon…
Keep a look out for a future newsletter where I will reveal the design of the other character in this amazing novel. And next week I will be announcing ANOTHER cover reveal! But that will be happening very soon over on Instagram, so if you want to see that then make sure you are following me over there. I will of course be following that up with a more detailed blog post about the making of the cover over here so you might want to subscribe so you don’t miss that.
While you’re here…
My Illoguild crew are AMAZING at writing brilliantly thoughtful, creative, useful substacks so you should go take a look at them. Here’s a few to get you started:
Thanks so much for reading this, please feel free to comment or ask any questions if you have any. I always love to connect here or on other social media channels.