Mystery Concepts

The cover for middle grade fantasy novel The Lost Stone of SkyCity by HM Waugh, published by Fremantle Press

Last year I had the pleasure of illustrating the cover for HM Waugh’s The Lost Stone of SkyCity, published by Fremantle Press. I had a lot of fun working on this, and I’ve done a full blog post detailing the process over at my blogspot blog. Here, however, I just want to touch a little on the way I pitch ideas:

The Mystery Illustration

I always try to find out exactly what the commissioner would like from an illustration to start with, so I know what they want to see. It just saves a lot of time in the long-run. Sometimes this requires a lot of questioning, but in this case I was told early on that the author (who I was not dealing with directly) liked the type of cover that featured the main characters standing together against a killer backdrop.

So far so good. I like those covers too! But my job as an illustrator isn’t to just give people what they want without exploring other options - otherwise you’re just hiring half of me! Have you ever seen Escape from the City? It’s a lifestyle show of the type my mother can’t get enough of, where house-hunters are shown four properties. The first three conform as exactly as possible to what they have said they were looking for, and the fourth is a ‘mystery house’ designed to challenge their expectations. Sometimes this gives them fresh ideas and a new way of looking at things.

I like to chuck a mystery concept into my work, if I can.

You can see the four rough concept sketches I initially sent Fremantle Press. (Sometimes I have to do more than four concepts before we hit on the perfect one, but I feel that four is a good number to start with.) The first three are, indeed, the main characters standing in front of a killer background - we’ve got ominous ice caves, cracking ice sheets and mysterious palace gates - but the fourth is my Mystery Concept. I took an exciting scene from the book, and used that. I felt it conveyed a lot of drama, excitement and adventure, and looked a little different, while also subtly reinforcing the themes of the book - two different cultures coming together and learning to combine their strengths, while there initially seems to be a great gulf between them.

I really liked that fourth concept, which is usually a sure way to ensure it doesn’t get chosen, but to my surprise, it was! If you look closely at that sketch, you’ll see that the heroine, Sunaya, is the one falling, being rescued by Praseep, but on the final cover, it’s the other way round. No one wanted a girl being rescued by a boy on the cover, so a change was written into the text so I could draw it the other way round!