Hi peeps, so sorry that it took us a while to get back to blogging. We have been busy, but that’s no excuse, we know! we know! But here we are now, back on this space.
So what’s been happening at the Worlds Beyond Art space since 2016 kicked off? A few things definitely!
Let’s go back to January… where we were introduced to the lovely Alice Cook (aka A.E. Cook) – young adult fantasy author – who commissioned us for cover design for all the books in her ‘The Xandi’ series.
The first book was ‘The Amber Key‘. We designed the cover based on an excerpt she sent us, including her descriptions of the main characters in, and her visions of, the scene.
It all went well, even with the urgency surrounding the release. We only had one week to finish the cover as she needed it to be available before she went on a writer’s conference! But after carefully planning and reorganising, we made it in time!
Click on the book to purchase.
Another project we completed in January was the cover for Sharon Gibbs‘ second book of ‘The Magic Within’ series – Resurrection of an Empire – and the release of the first book from her ‘The Magical Adventures of These Boys Three’ series – A Pirate Adventure.
A bit about ‘A Pirate Adventure’, we didn’t just draw the cover for this gorgeous children’s book, we had spent 6 months or so illustrating the entire book. It was a labour of love really, and the first children’s book we ever had the pleasure illustrating for! We loved every minute of it.
‘Resurrection of an Empire’ was released just yesterday! Click on the books to purchase.
February was a weird month for us. We still drew and planned and replied to authors’ queries, but unfortunately nothing was finalised. Things sometimes happens so in the art industry, we know. And we marched on! We love what we do. We love creating. And improving our art with every stroke of our fingers/styluses (what is the plural of stylus? Haha).
It was not until late February things started to pick up, one of the projects was Alice’s second book in ‘The Xandi’ series – ‘The Forest of Faces‘.
This one was a bit of a challenge because the scene she wanted was quite complex. There are people fighting, magnetic fields sprouting, main characters running, and… trees with faces. We had trouble visualising and fitting everything in a tight space of a cover at first, but then we decided to focus on the centre of action: the main characters and the panther – which was really fun to draw! – in the midst of rescuing their friends. We loved what we came up with and so did Alice!
‘The Forest of Faces’ will be released later in April. Click on the book to pre-order.
In March, we were suddenly busy with illustration work and we love it! We drew a few character concepts for Melody-Anne Jones Kaufmann for her soon to be released book ‘After The Return’ and a new banner for her website. We saw she has not posted these yet on her website so we won’t share these here. We will share these with you as soon as we can.
We also worked on the illustrations for Sharon Gibbs‘ second book of ‘The Magical Adventures of These Boys Three’ series – ‘A Fishy Tale’ – which we had, and are still having, a lot of fun with. This won’t be released until end of year but we’ll share one here as sneak-a-peak so you know what kind of fun we’ve been having!
Coming into April, we had the pleasure to design the coverart for Leo Champion‘s sixth novel – ‘The Emigrant‘ – which we JUST finished a few hours ago! ‘The Emigrant’ will be published via the ‘Henchman Press‘ publishing and should be live soon. We will share the links to purchase the book as soon as we got them.
The challenge with this one was that Leo wanted the cover to be stylistic. His exact instructions were ‘Ever seen Les Miserables? Think of the barricade scenes of that through a lens of Impressionism.’ I did panic at first, but as usual Isaia was the force of calm in this partnership. And the result was awesome! We loved the journey and the fun that came with this project very much.
Click on the book to purchase.
So that’s about it for the updates, thanks for stopping by. Now it’s your turn to tell us what’s been happening in your world!
View all our previous cover design projects here. View all our previous book illustration projects here. Contact us, we would love to draw for your projects.