Book Cover Illustration Process

Final art for the book cover without typography/title. Scroll down to see my work flow from start to finish. This book is selling on Amazon and the title is Planet Mission by David Claiborne

Step one: generating random silhouettes to create interest and spark ideas. I don't show this phase of the process to the client. It's just for me to play and inspire myself.

Step two: working from the random shape generation in step one I pick nine of these and take them to a thumbnail level to present to the client. I add notes for clarity

Step three: the client picks one of them and gives feedback and so these thumbnails reflect the input that the client requested

Step four: the previous thumbnail iterations in step three were rejected and the client picked another of the previous thumbnails. So I take this one and show three options for the client to pick from

Step five: the thumbnail process is finished when the client approves one of them and we move on to the rough comp stage

Step six: here I designed the main characters jumpsuit that will appear on the cover art

Step seven: begin the rough block in. You can see the line drawing with some tone on the right side and some photo reference and my rough thumbnail drawing on the left side

Step eight: here is the full layout with the front cover on the right and the wraparound back cover design on the left which they wanted to keep quite simple and traditional looking as if done with charcoal

Step nine: here is the final art let's both front and back covers. The jacket wrapped around so I had to make the front and back covers transition and work together.

Here is the final artwork of the front cover of the book

Finished product with masthead, spine and text/graphics