Jungle Grumble: Designing a Front Cover

The rough I sketched out last week has been approved - hurrah! Piccadilly Press has been working in close conjunction with a German publisher, so it had to be approved by their team too. 

They sent me this idea, which I think works pretty well, so most of the work was done already. I love the flamboyant text, picking up colours from the animals:

The hippo has been taken from a section of my existing artwork, from spread no 8 - the mega-parade. If you look closely, you can see that the texture is very peculiar in places. That's because the designer has done a quick Photoshop job on it, to get rid of things they didn't want. You can see what's changed by looking at this detail from the original illustration:

I popped the monkey/giraffe character it next to Hippo, instead of the elephant, to add more colour, with his dappled neck and flamingo wings. He was the only other character with sufficient height to tuck neatly into the space next to the title. I've created a little more room for our names too. Here's my sketch:

I still can't get up into the studio, so the artwork will have to wait another week. It shouldn't be too problematic to do though, since it's pretty much just copying the existing characters. I'll keep you posted.