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Most of the work presented below (barring one illustration at the very end of this post) was done for The Magic Store of Nu Cham Vu, a children's fantasy adventure written by my father (Shreekumar Varma) and published by Puffin. The book is full of surreal and magical characters and situations, so illustrating it was a great workout for my visual imagination.
A note on the book cover: The final cover design for the book (seen at the bottom of this post) was not done by me. The Disney-Aladdin-style typography isn't something I would have gone with, nor do I approve of the dull colour scheme and composition. The cover does use a portion of one of my illustrations, though, but it's been rather poorly cut up without my final approval. (If I sound belligerent and defensive, it's because I am, slightly. Then again, I'm also an inveterate control freak.) In any case, you'll see all my original concepts and artwork for the cover below, so you can compare the lot for yourself.
Nu Cham Vu's magic cat, from The Magic Store of Nu Cham Vu, Puffin
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The first major book project I worked on after completing The Insect Boy was Penguin's The Tenth Rasa, an anthology of nonsense -- poems, stories and songs -- from India. This was in 2005, if memory serves. This book was edited and compiled by Michael Heyman, Sumanyu Satpathy and Anushka Ravishankar. (Heyman, who has since gone onto shepherd more, bigger and exponentially frabjuous nonsense anthologies, is now considered the leading nonsense-rasika in the biz.) They came up with such hilarious and imaginative material for the book that it remains the most fun project I've worked on. Oh, and mine isn't the only artwork in the book: two of my co-illustrators, it is my distinct privilege to claim, are Sukumar Ray and Edward Lear!
My brief from the art director at Penguin was to come up with simple line drawings that could scale easily, along with a colourful cover that properly conveyed the idea of the title. This idea, as you've probably guessed, is that the navarasas are all well and good, but that the complete range of human emotions is effectively inaccessible without the tenth and most evocative rasa: nonsense. You'll see what I came up with for the cover, as well as the interior artwork, below.
Book cover illustrations and hand-done typography for The Tenth Rasa, Penguin
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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.
Detail from the cover art for Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan
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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
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Kicking off my series of rough/rejected/unfinished work samples is the following set of artwork from various Scholastic projects.
|Some of my finished, published work for Scholastic can be seen here.|
The first few images are rejected covers for The Insect Boy, followed by rough as well as finished pages from The Mathematics of Twins. The Mathematics... was a really fun book that I couldn't complete work on, unfortunately, due to a scheduling clash with a photography exhibition that I was then helping set up. The book was subsequently taken up and completed by another illustrator, but the publishers ended up using my cover design (but I'm putting it under the rejects pile anyway, because the character illustrations on the cover have since been replaced with the other illustrator's work).
This one was "too scary for younger readers". I prefer it to the final design, though.
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A large share of my early freelance work in the children's publishing industry was done for Scholastic. It was late-2004/early-2005, and the new editors at Scholastic India had just initiated an upgrade in their book production values (which were still a far cry from the beautifully-realized work being put out by their American and British divisions). I was a rookie illustrator, fresh out of design school, but these editors were kind enough to trust me with the drawing and redesign of their new titles. Here are a few illustrations, pages and covers from these books:
A Friend Called Buddy, Scholastic India
The above images are from a read-and-colour book called A Friend Called Buddy. Colour-in books at Scholastic were, until that point, poorly drawn, one-dimensional efforts held together by ill-conceived page and cover designs. My task was to bring more depth and detail to these books, and to enliven their style and design from cover to cover. The Peacock Who Forgot How to Dance (written by A. Edathatta) was another book I illustrated and designed in this series (see below).
Showing posts with label book covers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book covers. Show all posts
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