Book Cover evolution!

So… we’ve seen a few things about laying out my book here,  here,  here, and here with emphasis on

how the paintings were cut-up and put together on the pages.

But what about the cover?

This was version 1 of the cover- lot different from what we ended up with (which I’ll show you shortly).

I showed it around here and there and one response I got was, um it’s a picture book- how about showing

some pictures on the cover so the kiddies (and their parents) get that right away!

And, well, they had a point. It’s also incredibly red and orange. Originally as you can see, it had little doodles in the

background like the borders of the pages themselves.

So version 2:

A little different, right? I had the idea of showing the paintings as just line drawings inside the words, so I made the words bigger.

Then I decided to make the words “Get Around” bigger and “Ways to” a bit smaller to make room for doodles:

Then, we  scrapped that idea and decided to use images on the cover and shrink the type a bit:

Getting close to how it ended up looking! Still have the doodles in the background, but I’ve moved the series

title up top and removed the shadow on it, and I added a little green top and bottom border to offset the orange.

It’s still the same color orange, but since there’s much less of it, it seems subtler.

Final cover image:

Big difference, right?

A little white outline on “Mike and George’s” and one very important change- now it’s WEIRD world

of Wackiness. Before it was WILD world of Wackiness.

The title is bigger and all one line and there’s LOTS of images on the cover- Mike really wanted to show the plethora of

ways to get around that we show in the book! I’ve also swapped doodles in the background for words in the background

like we have on the pages.

Lemme tell you how hard it was arranging all those little images on the cover in a way that they all fit nicely and

had a good amount of space around them. Also- I wanted to alternate Mike’s paintings with mine.

My favorite touch is the guy in the inner tube floating along the bottom there and Mike’s round submarine right between

TO and GET in the title.

That’s it for now- see all the crazy things happen to a book before you get to read it!

Layout on my new book!

So, I’ve shown you some sketches (and the paintings they turned into) here and here

How about a little on how I did the book layout?

Here’s an early page layout I did…

And here’s a more final page layout for the same page with a few extra paintings added, too:

Originally, we thought of doing just simple white pages with a little border of fun cars and planes and stuff around them

but it just wasn’t snappy enough! So Mike asked me to put some color in the border, and I got to thinking about

making the drawings in the border a darker shade of the same color too!

And then I thought- hey, we can put some fun related words in the background in a similar color that would be cool

for kids to find, too! Then it really looked great! We wrote pages and pages of just the words that go in the background.

I also shrunk down the images on a lot of the pages so it was  a bunch of paintings instead of just 1 or 2 each page.

Here’s a few of the border drawings that we put into the book, too!

Most of these are drawn at maybe 4 inches high- in the book they’re shrunk down to just a 1/4 of an inch! Click the picture to see them bigger-

they’re some really great drawings that you can’t see this big in the book! Also, see the construction digger with the arrow pointing to it?

I asked Mike to draw something that could go around a corner in the border and he came up with that- great thinking, right?

I had to do some Photoshop magic to put these drawings in colors matching the borders. My personal favorite touch?

The dinosaur bus that is in the lower right corner of every page with his head popping up out of the border!

Next time, more sketches and paintings!

Even more about my book!

Last time dear viewers… I showed a sketch or two and some process about my latest

book “Ways to Get Around”

Now for some more sketches and what become of them!

I don’t think a single one of these sketches made it in! I did a painting of a guy with a red beard in a green suit skating like the one in this

sketch- but then realized he looked like a leprechaun! So he got the boot…

Originally, I had the idea to do a ‘ways to get around in the winter’ section of the book… but it got cut due to page limitations. The flying ones

gave way to some better ideas I had later. I like that propeller beanies are a way to get around, though. And the snowboarder has a great line to his legs

that I really was happy with. Maybe they’ll come back in another book- I save all my sketches!

Next one:

I used almost all of these drawings for the final paintings in the book! I even added a couple of animal drawings (and Mike put one in, too!)

The idea that we all need a little help sometimes was something I thought little kids needed to hear- even grown-ups and critters!

Here’s the page from the book:

Again, Mike’s ‘Toe Truck’  was way funnier than mine- but I used mine for another page  in the book, too.

Here’s a few of the animals I added to this page in sketch form also… The sketch of the rickshaw didn’t make it, and the pirate ship

was research for a page about traveling on the water that I’ll talk about later. The elephant drawing on the top ended up like this.

Next time- more sketches and some stuff about the layout, too! Enjoy!