The adventure takes to the sky!

I’m so excited to share Book 4 in the Pacey Packer Unicorn Tracker graphic novel series. In this one, Pacey has to tackle one of her biggest fears, heights, when she is forced to ride a dragon up above the clouds to rescue Mina from a very strange incident.

Let me take you into the process of planning this cover. Since the title of the book is Dragon Rider, it wasn’t too hard to figure out what the main image should be. Dragons! First I did a couple sketches for the team at Random House Graphic. A lot of people get involved with a cover: editors, art directors, marketing, etc. because the cover is the first glimpse and it has to attract the eye.

Here are a couple early sketches.

Here’s a sketch from a POV that is above Pacey and Slasher.

This is closer to the one we used.

The cover design comes very early in the process so a teaser can go on the back of the previous book’s cover. I hadn’t even fully realized the dragon’s look at this point. But I was making progress on Pacey and Mina’s clothing for Book 4. Here’s a look at my design sheet. (I design for the purple interior, then I figured out the colors when I was working on the overall colors of the cover.)

I make lots of notes as I’m designing their looks.

Once I figured out all the basics and Random House gave me notes on the cover they liked, I got to the formal design. We debated the color palette. They suggested pink but I was concerned that boys wouldn’t want to read a book with a pink cover, so I leaned toward yellow. I made both of them thinking I wouldn’t like the pink at all, but then I really did like it. But I think they came around to the yellow and that’s what we went with.

Two fully colored cover illustrations helped us decide which one to use.

Which one is your favorite?