O Holy Night: Making the Cover (Fact #5)
Welcome back to my series of facts about my upcoming debut author-illustrator picture book: O Holy Night: A Modern Christmas Carol! The book comes out on September 22nd, so I’m sharing facts all the way up until pub day.
Today’s fact is not a singular fact: but it’s a little insight into a process. Check it out below:
O HOLY NIGHT: FACT #5
Let's take a look into the making of the cover!
Today, we’re talking about the process of illustrating O Holy Night’s cover. In my humble opinion, and from an illustrator's standpoint, picture book covers can be one of the hardest parts of making a picture book. Think about it: a cover is the very first thing that a buyer sees. People say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but people certainly judge a picture book by its cover.
So, not only from the editor and art director’s standpoint, which is: does the cover represent your story in one illustration? But it also has to work from the sales’s team’s standpoint: is it compelling? It boils down to this: Upon first (or second) glance, will people want to pick it up off of a bookshelf and buy it? So, yeah. There can be a bit of pressure when it comes to illustrating a cover.
Now, let’s talk about the first step: rough sketches.
Going into the cover, we (my first editor Megan Abbate, my art director John Candell, the Bloomsbury design team, and I) weren’t sure what we wanted the cover to look like. Like usual in the picture book process, the team had me come up with a few ideas. I got to work and I ended up sketching these:
(Hardware note: I used my 12.9” iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, and the app Procreate to sketch.)
I originally came up with the three ideas above, and each had to do with the main family, the Joneses. I sent my sketches in and Megan and John asked, "Why don’t you focus on the youngest sister? We like her." And I basically replied, “Of course, she’s my favorite!” (Also, it's worth noting that the youngest sister's name is Zuri and she has her own Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Threads account.)
Some time passed by and Megan emailed me again. She told me that she took a look around my personal art page on my website. She then asked, "How about making a sketch like the piece you did of the little girl with the star, except with the main character holding her snow globe?” You can see the illustration below. I actually wrote about it a few years ago.
I thought that was a GREAT idea. So, I did a new sketch and this is what I came up with:
And the team was happy with that as the cover! We went with the second back cover sketch of the original three sketches (the family portrait hanging on the tree) for the official back cover. Now let’s talk about the next step: Final art.
After the rough sketch was approved to go to final, I did my final art in Adobe Photoshop. I always do my final art in Photoshop, by the way. It’s industry standard, so it’s powerful software. Most importantly, it allows me to tweak the technical stuff easily, like the color mode, color profile, and the dimensions/dpi. It allows the design team and I to be on the same page throughout the illustration process and the artwork always ends up printing out correctly.
Here is the very first round of final art:
I enjoyed rendering Zuri’s little puffer coat, which used to be pink in the earlier versions of interior art. I decided to change it to a bold holiday red. For the background, I painted a deep wintery blue gradient with cozy bokeh spots.
Now we get into the last step: Revisions, a.k.a Refining the Final Art.
When I sent my first round final art in to John, he thought it worked, but he suggested making the background green instead so it would give a more obvious Christmas feel. That made complete sense. After I adjusted the color, the cover looked like this:
However, John suggested, “What if you made the green a deeper green and added in a subtle pine bough texture?” I was completely on board. I revised the background and it looked like this:
Then John said something along the lines of, “YES. COOL. But can you make them more like actual trees, like one of the spot illustrations in the interior?” I knew exactly what he meant! So, I added the trees in the background and they looked like this:
And then John made the suggestion to lift Zuri's head so we could see more of her expression:
After I submitted this final revision, John had a chat with the design team and the Bloomsbury sales team. The sales team wanted the cover to "pop" more, so John added ribbon behind Zuri and brightened the tone of the background. Also, I made Zuri’s hat softer and less helmet-like, which is how we got to the final O Holy Night cover!
And that’s your O Holy Night behind the scenes fact for today. As you can see, picture books take a lot of work. There’s a lot of revisions and tweaking, especially with the covers. Below is a gif of all the steps together:
O Holy Night: A Modern Christmas Carol is available for preorder now and it will be officially released on September 22nd!
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