New Art: “The Monster Realm” book cover

Here’s the book cover I created for The Monster Realm by Nara Duffie! Check out the map and chapter headers too, which I posted previously on my blog. This is Nara’s first book – she completed it 11 days before her 11th birthday! She recently had booths at the LA Festival of Books and WonderCon promoting the book. It was really fun to help bring Nara’s story to life. You can read more about the book at http://www.roamandramble.com/all/the-monster-realm/.

Here is the final cover!

Here is how the front and back cover look together with the text design. The map is in the interior of the book, but also in color on the back:

Now for a couple of progress shots:

After discussing various cover ideas, I sent in these four mockups. They went with #3!

The cover drawing!

For the painting, I did a digital color composition which I then printed at around 30% on watercolor paper (a technique I first tried out on my Magic Flute comic page). I then didn’t have to do a base color layer with watercolor. I did some outlines with colored pencil before sealing it in matte medium. Then I did the real painting work on top of it with acryla gouache!