100 Mighty Dragons All Named Broccoli Cover Reveal!

The process behind designing a cover

In 2020, I signed on to illustrate a book.

It was about dragons. 100 of them.

So I learnt how to draw dragons. 100 of them.

And 100 baby dragons on top of that.

Finally today, I’m revealing the cover for this wonderful book!

But first, let’s play a game. I’m going to show you my process and you can see if you can guess which cover was ultimately chosen…

Step 1: Thumbnails

First, I started with loosely sketching out ideas that just randomly came to mind. This cover was hard to settle on because there are so many dragons included in the book. I was conflicted on whether or not I should include hoards of dragons on the cover, or just focus on just one for dramatic effect.

When it comes to designing a cover, I think the best tip I can give is that one of the most important aspects is readability from any size. Covers are spotted across a room at a book store, or seen as an icon on a website, so making sure a cover grabs the attention of whatever poor soul is looking for a book is crucial.

For some odd reason, I like to draw my own lettering on my covers. I am not a particularly wonderful hand letterer, but I enjoy the cohesiveness it brings to the cover. At one point I even considered making the letters out of dragons themselves as you can see in one of the sketches but I quickly found out this was wayy too difficult and weird to pull off.

Step 2: Narrow down choices and refine sketches

Here are the three final sketches that I ended up sending into my editor and art director. In the end, I was leaning more towards having the focus on one dragon so that it really pops out on a shelf or as an icon on a website. The book itself is extremely punchy and energetic so I felt that I needed to capture that on the cover. Also flames are really cool. At the same time, I also really liked having a big collage of different headshots of these funny dragons on the cover to make it really fun and energetic.

Step 3: Design a back cover & flaps

After we settled on the cover, I then go in and sketch out the back cover and the flaps for the jacket which wraps around the entire book.

Since the cover we decided one wasn’t going to show a lot of dragons (hint hint), I decided that the back cover should feature hoards of dragons so that readers can get an immediate sense of what the contents of the book would be like! Hence this dragon tornado that we settled on for the back cover of the jacket.

Step 4: Color Study

Before I start any actual painting, I always do a color study first. It helps ease my indecisiveness and anxiety about painting on real paper with real paints and just limits the amount of breakdowns I have along the way.

If you’ve made it this far… Okay, okay FINE! I’ll finally tell you which cover we went with…

Here is the final color study for the full jacket!

Step 5: Paint it

Below is a fun video of me painting this cover. I’m going to upload a shorter version to Instagram but you lovely cool kids get the juicy scoop before it goes up on Reels (barf). Sorry it’s in a vertical format, I can only satisfy one platform each time!

This book was painted with acrylic and finished with colored pencils. I wanted something bolder for this punchy book so I decided to experiment outside of watercolor. It was honestly so freeing to paint in acrylic because I could just mess around and have fun without having to worry about making mistakes (unlike watercolor).

Step 4: Add the lettering

And finally… TA-DA! Here she is in all her glory!

I’m so happy with how it turned out, I think it’s SO much fun and should pop right off a shelf.

So, if you’re looking for a fun counting book, that features 100 different dragons (and 100 baby ones) this is IT! The story and art is extremely chaotic as you follow 100 dragons come and go from their home on top of the mountain. Some become movie stars, others become astronauts and two of them even start a heavy metal band.

You can preorder this book below and you’ll get it when it comes out on April 4th, 2023! It’s available to preorder from Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, Powells, Indiebound, literally anywhere you buy books.

Thanks for supporting me and my work! As we come closer to the date I’ll have some fun things planned for this book but for now, enjoy this fun behind the scenes. 2023 is going to be a busy busy year since it’s the first of THREE books that are coming out next year that I worked on! Woohoo!

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P.S
This is a free Cool Kids post because this book is about to be released. But if you want to see the things I’m currently working on, you can become a paid subscriber and access posts like this for current projects!