Anatomy of a Cover...

A few days ago, I posted pictures of the covers for the last 8 Wind Dancer books. Since I am working on the next four covers right now, I thought I might show you a bit of the process. The first step is to come up with an approach that will unify this set of four covers, while still making them distinct from the previous sets. After a number of thumbnails exploring different options, we settled on close-up floral backgrounds.

- eventually we refined this to be more of a 'portrait' of the horse rather than a full-body view as the previous covers had been.

That decided, I did a round of rough mock-ups of all four covers, with varying poses and flora.

And then some color thumbs to sort out the various palettes and make sure they are appealing as a group.

Here's the next batch of refining the cover drawing for cover #9 - with a requested pose revision on the right.

The next round - fairly refined drawing to submit to Breyer for an anatomy check and approval.

And then a large, clean, refined drawing ready to scan, print and then paint. (Who knows where you can buy translucent drawing vellum by the roll? I'm currently enamored of doing this stage of drawing on that surface, but the vellum I can find by the pad is never quite large enough).

It takes me longer when I switch gears between drawing and painting, so I'm going to take all four covers to this level and then will print and paint them all at the same time.

So after eleventy-hundred dandelion petals, it's on to dew-drops and Lady's Mantle for book #10!