The Lion Queen Cover Reveal

You saw it here first folks! (Because its only allowed to go up on instagram tomorrow)

So unless you’re the kind of person that reads Publisher’s Weekly announcements or one of the 182 people who saw me post a screenshot of said announcement, you do not know that, hilariously, I’ve spent the last few months working on a book called The Lion Queen (I know I know, following up my tiger book with lions is a thing)

The Lion Queen is written by Rina Singh and is about the life of Rasila Vadher, the first female forest guide in Gir forest, Gujarat. More about my experience with the rest of the book soon, but for now !! I’m just going to take you through the cover!

The cover art for this was a JOURNEY. It took so long to get right that I needed months before I could reach the conclusion that it had, in fact, gone right.

My first set of sketches for some reason were all action movie posters. I do not know why this is and I will not be taking questions.

Obviously none of these fit so my art director had me try a couple of other approaches. They included this image of Rasila and a lioness that I really liked! Something about the muted colours on this came together for me and I was very excited to try painting it out.

My Art Director wanted to try a more head on view where Rasila was in profile and the lion was more conceptual, something metaphysical looking in the sky. This was the sketch:

And I went pretty immediately to a final because the publisher needed a sample of the cover for internally pretty quickly

This was the final. I liked it a LOT. I really enjoyed painting the scenery and it was exactly as loose as I wanted it to be. + the muted colours had translated nicely from my ipad sketch. If you know me, I love my jewel tones, so it was refreshing to work with a palette like this! I’ll admit I was noooot super sure about this Mufasa type lioness-in-the-sky-situation but I was not totally opposed either.

Unfortunately here’s where we take a bit of a confusing detour. The overwhelming feedback was to bring some of the lushness from my other work into this. This was definitely a confusing note for me because I was consciously trying to step away from what I was seeing as a gimmicky way of drawing foliage. I started to see it as fun for only a particular type of project (Tiger book). But I didn’t think it had much place in projects that didn’t share that aesthetic My guess is also that a recognisably Indian landscape (to a western audience) is lush and bright green rather than the dry, hot, open fields of grass I painted in. I think my uncertainty about Mufasa was also shared because she’ll later become a very literal lioness

On the left is a sketch my art director sent over. I know in theory the front cover, spine and back cover can all function as different parts but was really hard to conceive of this border just on the front cover, interrupting the complete, long scene I had painted plus, I did not like the foliage (didn’t think it made in-world sense) and thought it was just too busy!

Luckily my Art Director agreed, we were back on track with good compromise to simply to brighten up the grass. It changed the atmosphere of the painting and seemed to hit the right notes for the publisher!

The colours were a little tweaked to be brighter and we zoomed in and out a little bit to hit the right balance of space for the text. Note that what this little process tour did not show was a number of other physical painted drafts that had different colours (a bright sunset!), different size relationships between Rasila and the Lion and lots of trial and error for that motorcycle (I did not have a single clue what a motorcycle looked like). Maybe I’ll share those in a “whats on the cutting room floor” post. All the iterations were painted in gouache. I’m thankful for how forgiving the medium is because there was so much negotiating each of these elements and so much figuring out with the two that I had little experience painting (motorcycle, lioness in motion).

The book is out October 3, 2023 from Cameron Kids, an imprint of Abrams books.