A Tiger's Tale - Cover

In which I tell you in a very long winded way about a cover I painted 4 times

If you saw my breezy post on instagram you should know that I have been tracking this package since the order was put in by my publisher about a week ago and before that, I’d been pestering my lovely art director Katie for the tracking number over email ever since she let me know that ADVANCE COPIES OF MY BOOK WERE ON THEIR WAY.

This is not my first children’s book but IS my first major publisher big hard cover with a jacket case type children’s book (the type on the cover even has spot varnish and I am a child so I have simply been tilting it back and forth to see it shine) Its been well over a year since I sent off the final artwork so it feels like I’ve been waiting to share this project for ever and I finally can! I’m still working out how to share enough but not overshare with a project this size but taking you through the cover art might be a good way to start!

We hit the cover last, after the entire book had been nearly painted out. I sent over some cover sketches in gouache. The brief was simply to avoid a big tiger face surrounded by leaves because there are hundreds of books that look like that on the market ( as I’m sure you’ve seen). In retrospect the sketches I sent were maybe too loose but I was working so spontaneously and brushy that there was enough context I think?

This sketch remains a favourite of mine and I hope I can come back to it someday when tigers feel less like a party trick I’m pulling out.

I thought this one had potential too, it eventually made it into the interior art!

I sent these off and as is the deal with book covers, it went through many sets of eyes and Katie returned to say that actually they’d all really loved a piece from the interior that they wanted to turn into the cover. The piece in question was this

I painted this twice too just to get it right

It was born from a sketch that originally didn’t make it into the book because it was simply “development work” that I was doing while waiting for some last minute manuscript edits.

There was a little page at the end of the book that detailed some of the ways the reader could contribute to tiger conservation and we needed a striking image to end on. I originally couldn’t come up with anything so my art director suggested the above sketch from the “development work” pile.

You can see it below with some suggestions from her that would allow for space for the type etc.

I did paint it out sans background colour:

this was attempt number 2 on this layout, I don’t have pictures of the previous one but that brings us to 4?

I usually put in the stripes much later in the composition when I’m also doing the lines on the leaves. I think too early and I tend to avoid focusing on the structure of the tiger’s body itself. This time I had drawn these tigers so many times that I knew what mistakes I was making and so gave myself the stripes to do early as a little treat.

But found that the sunset gradient was really what brought the painting together. so I did the extremely brave thing and instead of painting the entire image over (I didn’t trust myself to get it right a fourth time) and went out and bought masking fluid, that dangerous, beautiful, terrifying thing and painted in the sunrise gradient!

I know the smart way to do things would have been to just paint the gradient on a separate page and layer it under the existing painting but I am not smart and I have to know for SURE what the physical painting looks like especially when it will eventually be reproduced physically in a book!

If you’re wondering what went in the sunset painting’s place at the end of the interior, we actually adapted one of the cover sketches I sent over to act as a final page!

A Tiger’s Tale is out April 13th in the UK from Bloomsbury!

(you should be able to just change ‘uk’ to ‘us’ or ‘in’ in the url for the appropriate preorder link!)