Vinayak Varma

Detail from the cover art for Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan

And then there was some work that I did on a couple of Hachette books for adults, while I was freelancing a few years ago. The artwork you see below consists of the cover and some pieces of interior artwork for Vijay Nair's The Boss is Not Your Friend, followed by the cover of Zac O'Yeah's Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan. The interior art for the former was left out of the final book (I was told that it was too cerebral for the target audience - which, bless 'em, was probably just a polite way of saying that the cartoons sucked). The Scandinavistan cover, meanwhile, ranks among my best work. I thoroughly enjoyed working on it.

Hachette India started its children's books division fairly recently, and I was privileged to contribute to some of their early projects, around four years ago. The cover designs and illustrations you see below were created for special one-off books that Hachette commissioned to capitalize on random Hallmark holidays - in the current examples, specifically, for Friendship Day, Mother's Day and Father's Day. The illustrations are fairly straightforward and risk-free, as you can see, but that was precisely my brief: to just make them friendly, colourful and appealing on a crowded bookshelf, nothing more, nothing less. I'll leave it to you to decide if I succeeded or not.

Rough sketch for Friends Forever book cover

Friends Forever, Hachette - Friendship Day stories