Finishing the Artwork

This week, I have been finishing off the last stragglers of my Jungle Grumble artwork -  mainly the front cover. 

Sometimes publishers ask you to do the cover at the beginning, because they want to use it for early publicity, but I hate that: it's much better to leave it til last. As I work through the illustrations for a book, I get more and more comfortable with the characters and the colour palette. I sometimes have to go back and tinker with the first illustration I tackle, because I realise I've got better as I go along. 

The cover illustration is so important. You want it to be as strong as it can possibly be, so I was really pleased to be allowed to leave it until the very end this time.

The Jungle Grumble cover is based on a detail from one of the spreads and, like most cover illustrations, it's not too complicated: simple, bold images generally work best. Because of this, I knew it wouldn't take too long to complete, so I thought it would be another good opportunity for John to do some filming.

The last demonstration film we made of me creating a piece of my pastel artwork, when I was working on Swap!, proved very popular. I've had such lovely feedback and it's had over 16,500 views so far, so I was pretty sure you would like another one. Here's that demo film, in case you missed it first time round:

I think it's far more interesting to film me working on an actual book, rather than a random drawing, but it can be a bit stressful to be filmed while I am grappling with one of my illustrations. I can get grumpy at the best of times, when things aren't working right and, as I'm sure you can imagine, the last thing I need then is John at my shoulder with a camera! That's another reason why we left the filming of the Jungle Grumble artwork until the cover, when (hopefully...) I knew pretty much what I was doing. 

Even though the cover illustration was far simpler to pastel-up than any of the inside spreads, we still shot 1.5 hours of film. Poor John now has the task of whittling that down to something more appropriate, without losing too much of the practical information. We will probably edit the demonstration into two halves, which will double the film's length, so we don't have to scrap quite as much. I will of course let you know once it's ready (or you can subscribe to my YouTube channel to get automatic updates on new films).

My task now is to double-check all the Jungle Grumble artwork for continuity errors, and do any last-minute tinkering, before everything is mounted up and sent off.