The other piece of art and design I had to think about when I decided to make this a book was the cover. While working on the animal drawings I had zero thought about if this was going to be a book, and less about details like covers. When I started working on colouring the drawings I realized that this book is probably going to need a cover. I'll admit that my first thought was just to collage a few of the drawings together and see if that worked out.
Then I was doodling in a my sketchbook and I decided to start with a circle. I thought that maybe I could make a circle (which is a common shape themed in this book) and randomly scatter a few drawings around it. I thought maybe the drawings could be held up using trees. Then I started thinking about decorating those trees with candy. Finally I thought that maybe instead of just reusing a few of the animal drawings, I could put some nice text in the trees.
Next thing I knew I had a rough concept for the cover. I used some pencil crayons to see how it might work in colour. I made a few mistakes on my rough attempt, but I feel like the overall concept worked. Now that I knew I was going this direction, I knew I had to ink it up and get it under the camera to shoot.
It took a few attempts to ink it up. I'm actually not very confident with my inking, particularly when it comes to letters. I feel like this worked pretty well, and the next phase was to colour it up. Fortunately that wasn't too hard as I already had a rough drawing in colour to reference. I probably should have done that with all the animal drawings, but live and learn.
Next, some of the challenges I had with this book.
CC