Having already created 2 pieces of character art for Lowri, I was really honoured when she asked me to create a new cover for her already released book ‘Call It Fête’. Lowri was keen to have a character cover and I was thrilled to get to draw Alex and Nate and the cute summer fête stall they fall in love over. 

Process

Call it Fête already had a cover, so this was a task to create something fresh and new and that created a lot of new value for Lowri when it comes to promoting the book and a future special edition.

Every process starts with a rough sketch. We wanted to honour some of the colour scheme from the first cover, for continuities sake, but add vibrancy and obviously, what I do best, characters! Lowri’s writes characters that are full of life which makes them very straight forward to to draw.

The description of their stall and their outfits was bright mismatched colours so I went for magenta to create a contrasting but pleasing colour for their green tshirts to work with, and the orange of the text that harks back to the first cover. I couldn’t leave out rainbow bunting to celebrate the queerness of this story!

Colour is such an important part of my process that I usually work in colour from the very beginning, I will almost always present a full colour sketch to clients in the first instance.

Next steps

The next step was to work on the individual elements of the cover – first I cleaned up the sketch of the characters for Lowri’s approval and worked on them until they were in their finished state.

Then came the stall and bunting. I made sure to keep all elements separate so that they can be repositioned easily on the cover and provided to the client as separate, background free, PNG files – hugely useful when creating marketing materials in Canva and other design software.

The technical bit

Early in the process I gathered all of Lowri’s technical specifications for her book cover via an online form that I use for book cover clients; her page count, the type of paper it was being printed on and so on. As one version of the book is being printed via Amazon KPD I created a template to her and their specifications and then designed the cover accordingly. The Kindle cover was supplied first followed by the full wrap paperback cover. I won’t reveal too much but there will be an additional version too, more to come on that.

I deliver files to my clients using a secure dropbox folder. In Lowri’s case I sent over multiple versions of the cover and all the component parts for her to use in her marketing campaign for the book. Book covers are a big investment and I always want to make sure clients get as much value out of them as possible.

The result

Lowri wanted to breathe new life into her novel after a rocky relationship with her previous cover designer and on the 1st birthday of it’s release. I’m happy to say she is a very happy client. I feel like we firmly placed the book in the cozy queer romance genre with this character based cover, she has a book cover she can feel proud and excited to show off and that opens up future possibilities for marketing the novel at book festivals events.

Check out my interview with Lowri about her books and inspirations here.