I really like coming up with fun covers for my books. I also like to find new artists for each book so that they all end up looking unique. I do plan to re-use one or two artists at some point though.
Anyway, for the ReportLab book I happened to stumble across Therese Larsson’s website and I really liked how she did her lighting in her artwork. She is from Sweden and has worked with some fairly big companies, including Disney, Google, and Adidas. You can read more about her on Behance.
I ended up commissioning the cover from her and I described what I wanted. Here is the initial sketch:
I thought this was a pretty good version of my vision, so I approved the concept. The next work in progress version of the cover looked like this:
While still a bit rough, I really liked how it was coming along and you can tell the lighting is neat even in this early version of the cover.
In this version, we have the main characters mostly done and the scene is pretty well put together too.
Here we get a lot more detail added to our main characters and a background mouse is added too.
And here is the final version of the cover (without the title). I still really like how the cover came out. I can’t wait to see it in print!
If you’d like to support the development of the book, check out the Kickstarter!