Cover Design Diary #1

The Muse of Missing Pieces is a short, cosy novella about two artist who tackle a commission together and fall in love. I decided to publish it because I liked it, and because I wanted to start sharing more of the larger world this story is a part of. While I’ve been working as an artist for ten years, I haven’t ever designed a book cover. It took a lot of playing around to get something I liked. In fact, this version is the second design I did, because while I adored my first design, I realised I wouldn’t be able to easily iterate it for the rest of the series of interconnected novella standalones.

So I tucked the first design away for a rainy day (or perhaps a special illustrated edition, one day—do people make special editions of tiny novellas?) and went back to the drawing board. Quite literally.

I came up with a number of sketches, all of which I liked. Mostly, this was an exercise in indecision. And because I like seeing other artists’ work processes and back-and-forthing, I decided to share my own!

I even tried some pattern/text-only style covers, mimicking my first (set-aside) cover. This is my comfort zone, more so than character illustrations.

Ultimately, though, I had to make a decision based on what I wanted to achieve with this cover—which was to communicate to potential readers what this story is. And it is cosy, romantic, slice-of-life, and heart-warming. There’s nothing overly dramatic about it, and mostly it’s very sweet. So, with that in mind, I went to see what other, more talented cover designers were doing. I noted a number of things, including having the characters front-and-center, having the protagonist look out of the page, have the love interest look at the main character… I made a long list, then picked a few reoccurring elements that I liked best.

The final sketch actually started as a charcoal drawing which I scanned in, then continued to work on digitally, hence the black-and-white beginnings. From this point, it was a very straight-forward process to colour, lay over some textures, and pick the final font for the title. I had fun with this, echoing the elements of mosaic in the ornamental border, and in the background of the paperback cover version.

And here is the final version. The gold colour-scheme was a bit unplanned, but I wanted it to have a warm, cosy glow to it and this is how it all turned out.