Anatomy of a Cover: José and the Pirate Captain Toledano!

We’re one month out from the publication date of my graphic novel José and the Pirate Captain Toledano!  (Click here to pre-order it on Amazon!)

Today, I thought it’d be fun to take a deep dive into the process of creating the book’s cover.

The process began with a series of sketches — doodles, really! — that I did about a year before I actually drew the cover.  This was early in the process of my illustrating the pages; Arnon and I thought we should look ahead and start thinking about ideas for the cover.

We put this aside for a while while I finished drawing the book.  Then, as I was finishing up painting the pages, it was time to return to the cover.  I did a series of sketches to explore different cover concepts.  Here are a few of them:

Over a period of a few weeks, I continued doing additional sketches and experimenting with different ideas:

Then I hit on this montage idea, which Arnon and I liked a lot, as did our partners at our publisher, Kar-Ben.  They felt this was the strongest cover concept so far, so I did some experimenting with the layout until we agreed on a version we all liked:

Kar-Ben asked for a few additional adjustments (such as increasing the size of José within the image), and then I inked the piece:

With Kar-Ben’s approval, I painted the cover, adding watercolor washes over my inks:

I then tweaked and corrected the painting using Photoshop.  And here is the finished layout, along with the awesome title treatment created by the talented team at Kar-Ben:

Thanks for reading!  You can click here to pre-order José and the Pirate Captain Toledano right now!  Thanks everyone for your support — I can’t wait for everyone to be able to hold the book in their hands when it comes out next month!

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