the girl from the sea - cover process

I love making comics. What I don’t love making? Covers for my comics.

Comics are about flow and pacing, about a selection of images that carry you through a story. My drawing style is pretty simple - each book is made up of hundreds or thousands of drawings, so I need to be efficient. I don’t want the reader to get hung up on visual details - I want to carry them as easily through the story as if they were reading prose. (This isn’t a hard rule for comics, by the way, just my personal preference.)

Covers are illustrations. They’re a single image that is meant to entice readers and accurately communicate the story. There are all sorts of considerations, like how it will look as a postage-stamp sized thumbnail on a website. They involve things I only halfway understand, like composition and color theory and typography (yes, comics involve this too, but it’s *different*). An anatomy mistake in a comic panel is easily ignored; an anatomy mistake in a cover will haunt you forever.

Starting out, I just knew I wanted to feature the two characters, and some aspect of the setting. These are the initial sketches I send my editor (Amanda Maciel) and art director (Phil Falco):

I actually really like A. There’s drama and a sense of place. But A looks more like the cover of an adventure book; you’d expect that main figure to be going on a journey, maybe searching for pirate treasure, while the looming face in the sky feels rather ominous. Since The Girl From the Sea is a sweet summer romance, we decided to focus in on sketches that prioritized the girls. C and D had an intimacy that felt appropriate, so I expanded them into color.

This is a fun part. I don’t know much about formal color theory, but I love how digital art lets me play around, using hue/saturation sliders and blending modes to find palettes I wouldn’t have thought of originally. I usually start with basic, expected colors (A1) and then start pushing them into more and more dramatic takes.

My editors liked B2 and C1 the most, for the summery palette. I was drawn to the romance of B1 (I will never ever be tired of how pink, purple, and teal look together!). We agreed to meet somewhere in the middle - bright, sunshiny colors with a flush of pink.

This is where I took the sketch, and then the inks. It looks quite simple, but I knew the color treatment on the water, rocks, and sky would add extra detail.

A fun fact - I was trying to find reference for this pose, and ended up basing it on a painting of Narcissus by John William Waterhouse. I wish I had something smart to say about this correlation (the narcissism of young love? the queerness of greek myth? idk) but honestly, it was just a helpful pose.

I also used a reference photo (this was mid 2020 so my hair was doing its own thing.)

As I was sketching, a Scholastic designer - the wildly talented Shivana Sookdeo - was working on title text. Typography is a mysterious beast and it was great to have a professional do this work! All I asked for was something flow-y and brush-y, and she knocked it out of the park.

There were some more tweaks to Morgan’s pose along the way, and the coloring process deserves its own eventual post - but I’m pleased with where the cover ended up.

The other fun thing we got to do was bring in a spot gloss for the title and for the water. This basically makes part of cover shiny, where the rest is matte.

Do you think we chose the right sketch? Do you have any thoughts about how you make comic covers, or your favorite comic covers? Let me know!

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Also, a big welcome to DAISY GAETA! She will be moderating and editing this newsletter 🎉 thank you, Daisy!