My Russian Book Covers

Many thanks to my FaceBook friend Maxim Mitrofanov who sent me these Russian covers of some of my books.

I do get sent most of my foreign editions but somehow I don't think I had seen these.

For me the Russian typography adds a beautiful quality of mystery to these covers.

A little bit of media news.

I hear there might be some coverage of The Gift of the Magi in the Irish Times and the Irish Independent tomorrow, Saturday.
I hope they will be kind.

Also I have just done a very brief Vox Pop for the BBC Radio 4 programme, Making History.
They are doing an investigation into where Dickens might have taken his inspiration for his character of Ebenezar Scrooge.
The programme is usually very interesting, so it might be worth a listen.
It goes out at 3pm next Tuesday.

The Launch of The Gift of the Magi

Getting back to the launch of The Gift of the Magi and my retrospective on-line exhibition which took place about two weeks ago, I've finally had a chance to put together a few photos from that joyous night.
It was held at Dublin's wonderful No10 venue.
Here are a few photographs from the evening.
There are still some paintings for sale on-line.

Full Step-by-Step of "The Gift of the Magi" cover

You can see a much fuller version of the step-by-step process I used to create the cover of The Gift of the Magi on Scamp, the Irish Illustration Blog.

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.

The Gift of the Magi

My newest book, O.Henry's The Gift of the Magi, is available for pre-order on Amazon.

I don't think it will be published until October but here is a first glimpse of the cover art.