My second project for publisher, Anvil Publishing, in its imprint, Flutter Fic, is the book cover illustration of TOTGA.
Art Director: JP Meneses
In the design brief, they want a couple in a hot air balloon with the city lights below, in pastel candy like colors. This is a second edition of the book and on the first cover, it was a bright, light and fun cover. They want to retain those colors that have been use for the first cover as well as the pastel, light and candy like feels of it.
So I went ahead and sent three different concepts with sketch and color for this project. One even includes a hot air ballon in heart shape.
Ultimately, we settled with this one since the color is closer to the previous cover and the overall composition is more centered on the characters.
I think one of the things that I struggled on is the mountains below where you could still see an abstracted city lights. And also, the characters! Because they were small, it was harder to add details. But I really enjoyed working on the colors of this one. Green, yellow and pink are color palette that I haven’t explored much so it was a fun to experiment with these colors.
In my art, I can’t abandon light. It’s really the one thing that puts my piece together. So, as you can see here, I really added the sun on the bottom right side so that there’s a light source that can highlight the hot air balloon of the characters.
Thanks to the direction of the art director, Sir JP Meneses and the trust of the author, Miss Jen, we were able complete this piece and I get to see my second cover project on a bookstore.
