Illustrating a book cover

Various cover illustration options

A couple years ago I was approached by Sonya to create an illustration for the cover of a book she was writing. It's a series of poems about her experience of suddenly becoming a caregiver to both her parents. I felt like this very raw and emotional piece needed a simple sketch showing the emotions behind facing such a challenging time. Above are some of the proposed illustrations I created for her book based on some of the poems I read. She chose the first one as you can see below. The book is now published and you can find out more about it on Amazon: Lightning Strikes Twice: Secret Confessions of a Career-Woman-Turned-Caregiver. 

Final cover

I would have loved to create artwork for each of the poems but that was out of her budget at the time. It did spark the idea of creating art for poems at some point in the future. 

This reminds me that I was approached earlier this year by someone looking to illustrate erotic short stories. That would also be a fun project to work on as it would allow me to get back into figure drawings: Something I used to do a lot more before and would love to get back to at some point. The only problem is that the prospect was looking for free sketches. I might have considered it if my rent and grocery was free. It's unfortunate that there's still this idea of expecting artist to create for others for free. There's so much work and effort that goes into creating a piece of artwork, no matter how long it takes to create a sketch today, it's from thousands of hours of practice and learning along the way mostly on our own while others are sleeping or entertaining themselves. Hopefully this mentality of the quintessential starving artist is changing for the better.