#coves

I often go through a wide variety of slightly different covers before I settle on one. Until I’m done with this step I have around 20 covers that look only the tiniest nuance different compared to another. Naturally I’ve already put quite some work into each of them before they are ultimately discarded. As for all the Moomin books there usually already are pictures to go to. I had a couple to choose from in this case. The one on upper right is the one that came with my book. You can see the difference in sizes and the quality is in parts abysmal so not all of them make good starting points to begin with. 

By chance I also came across one painting, that looks much more like the early works of Tove and I like the little differences and how it has more of water colour vibe than the others. So I settled for that one, but  as often the picture was too small, too incomplete, weirdly discoloured on one side (I blame the original scan) and way too small to fit the cover on one hand, and show all the staffage with enough ‘empty’ room to get nice turn in’s and position the picture on the cover on the other .

I shifted the whole picture from a greenish-grey hue to a more bluish one to fit the endbands I’d already sewn with a different, more blue, cover in mind.  I considered my usual way to finish one picture and just flip it so it mirrors on the backside, but here this didn’t look right. (Of course I tried it, I even tried what a slightly altered version would look like but eventually abandoned the idea.)

 Finally I settled for an empty sea (again I doubled the work by first cleaning up one picture just to notice pretty much when I was done, that there was something wrong with the shading and the horizon was off. So I did it again this time working the whole cover as one piece to be cut in two)