Custom Cover Illustrations
Bringing incredible stories to life with a cover that brings the beauty of the story to the exterior, enticing your target audience with a unique but appealing cover designed through several stages of back and forth discussion and drawings.
Pricing- what to expect
My watercolour book cover prices start from £150. Complexities in covers and other spesfics can increase the price. Book covers that are bundlled with other services such as a full children's book illustration package or novek ink illustrations may be subject to a special bundle price.
Fiction in Focus
Hand-painted in watercolour, each of these covers brings a unique, tactile quality to the stories they represent. From tender YA romances to reflective memoirs, from fantasy-infused love stories to cozy, witchy reads, this collection showcases how traditional media can bring softness, depth, and character to contemporary cover design. My goal is to create covers that don’t just hint at the story inside, but feel like part of it evocative, personal, and impossible to scroll past.
Flexibilty in illustration
Where you arent completely sure, what colour pallete suits your novel but know what should be on it. I can help provide clairty by creating several cover iterations in various colours for you to choose between at no extra cost to you. In this example, you can see how one cover took on various colour ways.
Children's Picture Book Covers
These covers are designed to spark curiosity before the first page is even turned. Painted in watercolour, each piece brings warmth, charm, and texture to the world of children’s storytelling. Whether whimsical, heartfelt, or full of adventure, these covers are crafted to reflect the tone of the story while inviting young readers into a world that feels alive and lovingly made. My goal is to create covers that feel like part of the book’s magic not just a beginning, but a promise of what’s to come.
How I bring stories alive
Creating a book cover is a collaborative multi-step process, creating an artistic representation of the book that takes into account plot, characters, genres, tropes and more. Here's a brief guide to how I work with authors to bring their books to life visually:
Step 1: First Conversation
We begin with a thoughtful discussion about your book, covering its genre, tone, target audience, key characters, themes, settings, and any visual ideas you already have. Some authors come to me with a clear vision; others are still discovering what their cover should be. Wherever you're starting from, this conversation helps me understand your story and tailor the process to your needs. Some steps may be expanding where you need more exploration and other steps may be shortened if you have a more clear vision for me to bring to life.
Step 2: Thumbnail Sketches
I create 10–30 small concept sketches (thumbnails) exploring a range of visual directions. These rough ideas spark further conversation: what you’re drawn to, what doesn’t feel quite right, and which concepts are starting to resonate. Sometimes, I’ll combine elements from different thumbnails or create a few new ones as we hone in on the right direction. The thumb-nailing process can become several rounds if we need.
Step 3: Refined Sketches
Together, we select 2–5 of the strongest ideas to develop into fully detailed sketches. These include text in proper fonts and layout, no more wobbly lines. The number of options depends on how confident you are in the concept; if you’re unsure, I’ll sketch more so we can explore. If you already feel set on one, I may provide one alternate to compare and confirm.
Step 4: Final Sketch & Painting Prep
Once a design is chosen, I refine the sketch until it’s exactly right. This stage is crucial, especially with watercolour, since revisions after painting are limited. We may go through several iterations to ensure every detail is in place before I begin painting the final version.
Step 5: Optional Colour Variations
For authors unsure about colour choices, I can provide colour iterations using digital adjustment layers. This might include different title colour options or full palette shifts to help visualise the final look before committing to the painted version.
Step 6: Final Touches
After painting, I complete the final tweaks and polish the artwork to deliver a professional, print-ready cover, one that captures the soul of your story and stands out on the shelf.
An example: Pip the Patient Gardener
To aid your understanding of my process and why each step is important. I will now take you through each step of my process with a real world example. Pip the patient Gardener is a childrens picture book. As with all my picture books and cover commissions, the cover gets its own personalised design process.
Step 1: First Conversation
We began by discussing the book in length, as i had already fully illustrated this 32 page picture book i was very familiar with the story and its characters. Nonetheless, when i began to think about the cover i had a detailed conversation with the author about her intentions and visions for the cover as well as if there was anything spesfic she wanted to see. In this case, the author was mostly unsure what she wanted to see in a cover illustration. So, starting the brainstorming process what i knew was that we wanted an eye-catching visually engaging cover with the main character on that represented the themes of patience and gardening.
Step 2: Thumbnail Sketches
For this cover, i created 20 rough concept sketches exploring a range of visual directions within the perimeters we had set. We then had a meeting about the designs and picked 4 designs to further explore
I then created 6 bigger more detailed thumbnails for each of the 4 selected ideas to explore further compositions and variations within that specific concept. These were then presented to the author and we selected five ideas for me to draw up a refined sketch of for the final decision.
Step 3: Refined Sketches
Having discussed and selected 5 promising ideas, the next step was producing 5 fully developed sketches. These sketches maintained the essence of the idea but gained precision and clarity allowing the author to fully visualise each cover and make a fully informed choice on the best cover moving forward. Due to thinking so many of the ideas were strong and being unsure on the best choice, we made the mutal decision to explore five ideas. Here are the 5 sketches. The authour chose to work with cover design 3 as she felt it really embodied the themes.
Step 4: Final Sketch & Painting Prep
With design 3 chosen and no further changes requested, i emarked onto painting. With this being for a picture book, the colour schemes were alreadly largely established so this didnt need as much discussion as singular cover illustrations, we discussed the text colour but ultimatly, this is something easily experimented with after the base painting is complete.
Final touches
Then i added some final touches to enhance the cover, perfected the colours and added little details like the rainbow in the water spray and bigger ones like the shining title! Then i submitted to the author who was super pleased!
Like my work?
If you like my cover art, get in touch!
tell me about your book!