Last Boy at St Edith's by Lee Gjertsen Malone

The cover I did for Lee Gjertsen Malone's debut YA novel, The Last Boy At St. Edith's, has just been revealed and I'm excited to finally post about it! As the cover shows, the story is about a young boy stuck in an all-girls school, and his adventurous attempts to get himself expelled.

It was great fun to illustrate this long crowd of characters wrapping around the entire jacket, and to letter the title by hand. I'm also really pleased with the palette and limited color.

Here's a look at the original drawing. All line-work is drawn by hand, though I did make numerous digital tweaks afterwards and redid the type several times till we had it right.

Thanks again to the awesome folks at Simon & Schuster, especially Art Director Laura DiSiena, and Lee Gjertsen Malone for her great story! Now we have to wait till the book comes out in February of 2016!

Can I See Your ID? – Blue Cover

With any book in the publishing industry, the cover is always very important and a lot of things are tried out before reaching the final result. So it's not unusual that we made a last minute change to the cover for Chris Barton's Can I See Your ID?, coming out in April from Dial Books for Young Readers

Reverting to the initial version that I suggested, we changed the color scheme to a blue one. I liked the red version, but then I think the new one is a bit more ominous rather than aggressive. I kind of like them both, so I'm glad that Dial made the final call.

Thanks again to Designer Jasmin Rubero for working so hard with me on it. The book is now available for pre-order from Amazon, and IndieBound and will be in stores April 2010!

Fall Image

Fall has begun…

Can I See Your ID

Here is the cover and one interior piece for a forthcoming book that I illustrated for Dial Books for Young Readers / Penguin. It is a collection of true stories about people who pretended to be someone else, written by Chris Barton, author of Shark vs. Train and The Day-Glo Brothers. I had the pleasure to contribute ten one-page comics to introduce each story. The cover took us a while to figure out, but I'm happy with the result. It was fun to actually rip paper, to accomplish this effect.

A New Book?

Why The Sea Is Salty is part of a series published by Oxford University Press. I believe it's not listed on their site yet but I have received my copy already so here are some sneak peaks! The book has three stories, one of which I have illustrated (which tells the story of, well, why the sea is salty!), the two others and the cover was illustrated by Meg Hunt.