Chowder Rules! ...how the cover was made

Today I’m showing you the process of creating the cover for Chowder Rules!, my new picture book written by Anna Crowley Redding, coming out in October 2020 from Islandport Press.

When making a book, the cover almost always comes first. This is for marketing and sales purposes, because while the book is being made by the production team and the illustrator, the sales and marketing folks at the publisher are already hard at work creating a plan, getting the word out and selling the book, well before the book itself is done. The production schedule for Chowder Rules! was nice and long (Yay! A long schedule means less stress for me) so I was fortunate to be able to start working on the interior thumbnail sketches before the final art for the cover was due, which meant I was able to really think about the cover at the same time I was planning the interior. This is not always the case for every book.

For the cover (and the interior too) I worked closely with the editor (Melissa Kim) and the art director and designer (Teresa Lagrange). Before I began we talked about ideas, each giving suggestions for what the cover could look like, and what important things it needed to convey. Once I started putting pencil to paper, I made a lot of notes, scribbling down ideas and snippets of ideas. I made a lot of almost indecipherable thumbnail sketches. I walked away from them for a few days and then came back with fresh eyes and made more sketches. And more sketches. And then I collected the strongest and presented them to the team at Islandport.

As you can see, they are rough! Thumbnail sketches aren’t pretty - they are meant to be a tool to get a quick idea across, and I added notes to mine to make sure my ideas were clear.

The team decided that the duel /cook off was the way to go, so they chose option 1. I was very pleased with this direction, as it would mimic an inside spread I had planned - to show the main character and his rival back-to-back in an old fashioned dueling pose, holding soup ladles and wearing chefs clothing.

The next step was to do a clear and clean pencil sketch. As with all my sketches, I started out pencil on paper, scanning in the elements I like and tweaking the composition digitally in Photoshop.

The sketch was approved, and I moved on to the color study.

I figured out a color palette for the entire book - which I will discuss further in another post when I talk about the interior. All I’ll say here is that for me, the color study is the most important part of the illustration process. Even though the sketch is approved and I’m so excited to dive into the final art, I have to stop and remind myself that the color study is of the utmost importance. Now is the time to slow down and get a firm plan in place, THEN I can dive in and have fun. I do my color studies digitally - whether the final art is done in traditional mediums or digitally. They are rough too - just blobs of color, to give me the overall impression of where each color will go. It’s not about shading or rendering at this point, but about planning.

So when I did my color study, I couldn’t come to a decision. I had come up with 2 color options for the cover that I liked equally. Teal and Gray. So I let Melissa and Teresa make the call. They chose Teal.

NOW it was time to dive in!

The final art of Chowder Rules! was created mostly in Procreate on my iPad Pro. I painted and scanned in watercolor and acrylic textures and paintbrush-and-blob elements, as well as other interesting paper textures to use in almost a collage manner throughout the book. I painted digitally, and assembled all the collage textures digitally, with some minor photoshop tweaking at the end.

The art director/designer had a suggestion to add certain background elements to the cover, of the NYC skyline and Maine lighthouse. I loved the idea! It really helps show the two locations rivalry, and adds visual interest. Go team!

I hand lettered the subtitle, and did my final tweaks, while Teresa (the designer) compiled it all.

And with that, we have the final front cover!

Next time I’ll show you my process on the interior.