EllRay cover art

Sally Warner, author of the Emma chapter book series published by Viking, has written new stories about another one of the characters in the Emma books. His name is EllRay. The first book is scheduled to come out in Spring 2011. It's a new series, so there's always a lot work that goes into the jacket design. At this point, we've gone through a lot of versions...

First, we tried something similar to the look and feel of the Emma series...I made a few sketches:


So then Nancy, the book designer at Viking, put together the following comp:


But then, the Viking marketing department suggested trying something new—an image of EllRay in his environment...so I tried some new sketches:



Then, Viking said that EllRay looked too fearful and/or too angry and that the overall image needed to be "lighter". I've just sent them these sketches:

I'll keep you posted on what comes next...