Swap! - Front Cover Design

I drew the 'rough' for the front cover a long time ago. You might remember how I worked through a range of different possibilities before deciding on this:

The diagonal line through the illustration is there because I wanted to use two different colours, partly to assist the design, but also to underline the idea of there being two sides, like the two sides in the story, which are going to swap over.

To help to make the cover as punchy as possible, I didn't want the two background colours to be drawn in pastels but to be dropped in digitally. However, even at the point when I was colouring the final pastel artwork, I didn't have much idea of which colour combination I wanted to use for the background.

But this week, once I had cut away the pastel paper in Photoshop, I suddenly had to decide. I wanted to stick to the colour palette from the inside illustrations, so I tried out some alternatives. My first thought was the pink and blue above. It's nice and rich, but felt a little heavy. The yellow and turquoise below seemed more lively and threw the characters and text forwards more:

I ran both alternatives by my Designer at the publisher. Luckily she agreed with me, so yellow and turquoise it is (at least for now...).