The Process of Designing a Book Cover - A Series 🪿🤖

The Wild Robot by Peter Brown

"What happened was not your fault. But what you did to try to fix it is everything"

Welcome to the second post in my book cover series! As one of my ongoing projects, I create speculative book cover artwork for stories and books. This is an exercise to improve my skills as a book cover artist and illustrator and between you and me, helps to keep me focused while reading. I have an annoying habit of drifting off into thought while I am sat reading, so having to take my own notes like I do with any manuscript I’m illustrating, is a great way to help keep my mind focused.

In this post you’ll find a detailed run-down of my process, including sketches, artwork and a process video at the end. If you’re a Free Subscriber, I’m offering a limited time 7-week free trial for you to access all my paywalled content as well as free access to 1 paywalled post!

Let’s start!

Reading and Taking Notes

As with any book project, the first and most important step for me is to read through the book itself. I avoid any and all form of previously illustrated material online as I would want to start on a blank slate and build my ideas based off of what I’m reading. The trickiest part with the Wild Robot Book Cover was probably because I had recently watched the movie a few months before, a movie which left such an impact which made eliminating details and parts of the story that were only in the movie a bit tricky. The book had been sitting on the shelf for a good year, and when I finally decided to start it, I couldn’t put it down.

What I essentially took out of reading the book:

1. The main characters to me were the island itself, Rozzum and Brightbill

2. Secondary characters: Fink, Loudwing and Chit Chat

3. A story centred on finding family and home in the wildest and most unlikely of places

The original cover by Peter Brown is pretty iconic, and I loved the simplicity in the work however I focused on taking it in a different stylistic direction as much as possible, which was quite tough but I was up for the challenge.

Sketching and Visualising

This is the fun part! It’s a chance to let out all the ideas circling in my head onto a blank canvas. I combined this part with the colour studies I create in my sketchbook, and looked for photos in my gallery that included birds, geese and a wilder-looking landscape just to start getting a clearer idea of the mood and also to practice drawing some geese. I’m quite familiar with birds, but geese in particular were not an animal I drew before.

Pages from my sketchbook

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Goose sketches

In addition to the studies I made of the landscape and animals, I felt like the essence of this illustration would really encapsulate the entire image as a whole - like the elements needed to all tie in together so I went straight in with exploring compositions for the cover to understand how the characters would be interacting together in the illustration. I’ve picked 3 of my favourites to share with you here, as I felt that all of them had potential in their own way, but I decided to go with the one that I felt would be the most striking.