Look, it's a book!

And my art is on the cover!

When Ria saw the video my mom posted of her getting the first box of books, she danced around and said "Look Mommy, it's your picture!  Your lovely picture that you maded!"

It's good to have a fan ;)

I Love Local Food (and a book blitz!)

A little watercolour I made to help my mom (author Valerie Comer) promote her awesome new novel Raspberries and Vinegar.  You may remember the cover art I did for it earlier.  It's such a great book; a fun Christian Romance with farming, puppies, baby mice (who are, sadly, disgusting and not cute like baby animals should be), and enough good local food to make you hungry.  I'm not just saying I like it because my mom wrote it, it's a great book.

So, what does the illustration have to do with anything?  If you order her book in paperback by the 9th, you get a bunch of awesome freebies, including the book in e-book form, and a printable pdf of my local food painting to hang on your wall :)

You also get:
- Desktop wallpaper's with my cover art
- a video recipe showing how to make Raspberry Vinegar (my favourite summer drink!)
- A 92 minute podcast where Valerie interviews special guests Dr. Ruth Valerio, Melissa K. Noriss, Kathi Macias and 6 others on "Where Food Meets Faith" for them.
- 101 Ways to be a locavore
- 7 Days to Simple: Purify Your Life, an E-book by Melissa K Noriss
- Some samples of other great related books you might enjoy

Buy it here!  Do it by the 9th to get pretty art!

Cover Design Process for Raspberries and Vinegar

Once upon a time, my talented Mother wrote a book called "Raspberries and Vinegar".  No wait, that's a lie.  She wrote a book called "Domino's Game".  She thought about self publishing the novel and asked me about doing a cover.  I played around with a sketch as I read the book, and came up with this:

A short while later, Mom sold the book to Choose Now Publishing and told Nicole (the publisher) about her lovely illustrator daughter who had already come up with a cover idea.  I showed them both my sketch, and surprisingly they decided to trust me, even though it was clearly a hot mess at that point.

We changed the title to "Simply Smitten", Mom told me that Zach actually wanted to wear a newsboy cap, and I told her that really, he didn't have a mustache (see, I had already refused to draw it).  She changed it to a short beard.  And told me that Jo didn't have curly hair.  Oh, and changed the name to "Raspberries and Vinegar".  No more titles!

I asked a couple friends to model for me.  Aren't they adorable?   They got married later that week.  This is actually two shots combined with photoshop magic powers.

Now, I knew that Zach was supposed to be about ten years older than my friend Kyle, and that he needed a beard and a hat.  I wanted Jo to be wearing Hunter boots (I wish I had a pair, but for now I will just draw them).  Also, I needed a border collie puppy.  Time to hit up Google for some references.

I swear, I just typed in "short beard" and "newsboy cap".  But Google choose to send me Chris Hemsworth and Brad Pitt.  Who am I to argue with Google?

Armed with my references, I did up a sketch of the couple.  I used a grid to get the proportions down and then bulked Zach up to look older and changed the other character details.

 Coloured for a while, drew in a puppy, added some text and: Tadah!  Front cover.  I can't wait to see it on the book!

Raspberries and Vinegar Cover

Here's the front cover for the upcoming novel Raspberries and Vinegar by Valerie Comer.  It's been released in August from Choose Now Publishing.  It's my first book cover and I'm very happy/excited about it :)

I'll post about the design process later this week!