We recently finished one of the largest design jobs we have ever undertaken: designing and illustrating the cover and inner page elements for a novel by my friend George Smith. The novel is called 'Reveille', and it is an historical fiction novel based off George's great grandfather: Charles Andre. The story takes place before and after the Civil War, and though he travels with the war, the most central location is Louisiana.

We helped do a simple site for George's last book, 'Uncertain Times.' When he began work on the new book he thought of us, not for site design, but for illustration and design of the book itself.

I decided I wanted to do the drawing for the cover in scratch board. Scratch board (or clay board) is a piece of masonite - in the case of the one I used- painted white, then a thin piece of clay is covered over that and painted black. When you use one of the scratching utensils to remove the black clay, the white board shows through. It is more akin to carving, than drawing, and when using the black clayboard the other tricky thing is you are drawing the highlights, not the shadows. When you draw with black lead on white paper it is the shadows you are collecting on the paper, when drawing on black with white it is like 'opposite drawing'

Here is the picture I drew for the cover, maybe it will help this make sense. You can click on the image to make it bigger:


The next steps were as follows: paint the drawing, and design the full cover: front, spine, and back with title, text, and additional images. This was all done in the Adobe Creative Suite:


I felt like the muted reds and yellows, and the scratching/rough textures created a style that seemed to fitting with the story and the era in which the story takes place.

At first George wanted us to do illustrations for each chapter, a scene from each one that could go above the chapter heading. We both came to the conclusion, however, that with 34 chapters detailed scenes for each one would be very time consuming. Then I had an idea for doing icons for each chapter. Something small, that could either symbolize something in the chapter or directly reference it.

I wanted the icons to feel like the cover, but not take so long to draw. Secondly, clay board is expensive, about $8 dollars a sheet, for 34 chapters we are talking close to $300. The obvious solution was to illustrate using a computer program (Adobe Illustrator to be exact) but I had to define a style, and then I had to emulate that style 34 times.

In my mind I seen the icons as logos that might have been used in newspapers from 150 years ago. It wasn't until my third or forth one that I finally settled on a style, I was trying to make them look like woodcuts:

This process was working really well, it only took about an hour to draw one (as opposed to 6 like the cover) and I could teach Clint (the other designer) how to emulate this style so we could both draw them in order to meet the deadline in time.

The only problem with this style is it was too computer-generated looking. So after we made them I added some distress marks in Photoshop and brought them back into Illustrator and colored them the same muted red as I used with the cover. This made them look more authentic:


Next I added the chapter number and name to each icon, and the chapter heading pages should looks as follows:


We are finished, now after it prints it just needs to become a New York Times' best seller!