Creating the Cover of Loveless with Alice Oseman!
Hi! I’m author and illustrator Alice Oseman, and I got to design the cover for the US edition of my latest YA novel, Loveless. I’m here to tell you all about that design process, from the first sketches to the finished cover!
I had a pretty clear vision of what I wanted the cover to look like right at the start. Loveless is set at university, and its protagonist, Georgia, is thrust into a world of packed college bars, sweaty clubs, lecture halls, and busy dorms. Students are everywhere, but the main characters of Loveless are all little alone in their feelings. So my idea for the cover of Loveless was to feature the five main characters of the story amidst a tightly packed crowd of students at a college bar, to try to capture that feeling of being alone in a crowd.
Scholastic liked my idea (YAY!) but their suggestion was to bring Georgia to the foreground a little more, so she’s clearly the protagonist of the story. I did this in the next stage of my cover design process – the line art stage. I transformed my sketch into a much tidier line art illustration, and I was super happy with how it was looking!
Next up was colour. I’ve always considered colour to be one of my weaker skills as an artist, so I wanted to try out lots of rough ideas before settling on a colour scheme for the cover. I knew I wanted purple to be a big feature – it’s the colour of the UK cover, which I fought very hard for, because it’s the main colour of the asexual flag.
I started with some rough studies:
And then I went ahead and coloured the illustration. I still wasn’t happy with my colour choices, so I edited the colours a lot and created a new spread of colour ideas. There were a lot of them, so here are just a few:
Eventually, and with Scholastic’s help, I settled on the colours I liked. I added in some final tweaks and details, and then the illustration was complete! I handed it over to Scholastic to create the typography for the text and to add on all the final bits and bobs. And then… we had a cover!
Start reading Loveless now!
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