A Pizza My Heart Cover Reveal!

As some of you might know, I was commissioned back in February to create a book cover for the anthology A Pizza My Heart, compiled by Jolene Haley. Well today, after many months and lots of (fun!) hard work, I get to show the cover to the world! *EEP* Jolene agreed once we had finished this cover that I could make this post, showing my step by step process on how the cover was made. I'm so excited to share it with all of you!

First, I'm going to tell you a little about my tools of the trade! I use a lovely Wacom Bamboo Create drawing tablet that was actually gifted to me by my friends a little over a year ago. As for software, I use Paint Tool SAI with an add-on software that allows me to edit text. Whenever you see me with a pencil and paper, it's probably a generic mechanical pencil and Bienfang paper.

The very first step was to get a rough idea of what Jolene wanted. She told me the genre, target audience, and general aesthetic she wanted to get from the cover. Her words were "Fun, bright colors, and some type of pizza on the front.". She also included a super-mega-helpful inspiration board that can be viewed here.

From her first email, I created four thumbnails of possible cover images.

At the time, my favorites were the top right corner, and the bottom left corner

This took roughly an hour, maybe less, and were done traditionally in a sketchbook. Each of these is about the size of my thumb. At the time, we thought the cover was going to be traditional media (pencils, inks, and watercolor), otherwise I might have done this on my computer.

At this point, we decided the first thumbnail was the one we'd go with. Jolene was worried the image might be too plain, so she suggested a splash of color be placed behind the pizza. So based on the images on her pinterest board and the feedback given thus far, I whipped up a few more concepts!

Jolene was very pleased with these mock ups. And I mean very. We were on the fence about the splatter at this point. The anthology didn't yet have a title, so I was improvising here.

In this phase of the project, I was experimenting with fonts and colors for the background. I widened the splatter and tweaked the colors to make it all more vibrant and generally appealing. Jolene made a great call on the splatter! The central image was enlarged to make it all more readable in a thumbnail format.

However, we still had some concerns. The fonts and the colors were troubling us. Jolene felt that the cover was too yellow, and I went a little overboard with the splatter. She also suggested a different pastel, such as blue or purple.

In Jolene's next correspondence, she had a stroke of pure brilliance and put together a color scheme for this cover that really brought it all together! She also included the list of authors for me to add to the cover, and sent me some fonts to play with.

There's a HUGE leap from the last image to this one, because we got down to crunch time. Between this batch of images and the next, I lined the piece from scratch, re-did all the colors according to Jolene's brilliance, and drew out the title. Yes, that's my handwriting all over this cover!

Can you hear that? Is it just me? I could have sworn I heard ANGELS SINGING. I can also still hear my hand cramping because wow, lots of words.

From this point, all Jolene wanted changed was the colors of the words on the cover. Which was a great call. I picked us this handsome blue for the author's names, and the dark red for the title, which leads us to...

TAH DAAAAAH

The final cover!

This cover was a real joy to make, and Jolene is a dream to work with! I love this cover, and I can't wait to see the success I know this book will achieve. Here's to you, Jolene, and to all fifteen other authors who are making this possible!

A Pizza My Heart will be available November 12th, 2016. You can check out all the cheesy details here. I hope to work with Jolene again in the future, but in the meantime...I gotta go get some pizza.