Roughs for the cover of The Gift of The Magi

Here are a couple of roughs for the cover of The Gift of The Magi.

The first is a quick sketch that I coloured in Photoshop, and you can see how I was trying to make the type work against the lightness of the window.

A few variations of this went back and forth between myself and Liz Woods, my designer at Walker Books. 

Liz is an extraordinary designer. She takes immense pains in getting every detail of a book cover just right, and is a very inspiring person to work with.

The next drawing is the final rough, but this also needed to be tweaked. I remember that the size of the table and chair in the foreground were a cause of much deliberation. Again, Photoshop makes it easy to change the size of elements like that, and to move them around.

And the last picture shows the almost finished painting. Look how much bleed there is. (That is the surplus area around the actual cover image) This is needed for wrapping around flaps etc, but it makes it very much more difficult to consider the essential image as you are painting it.