Squeezing Hundreds of Pigs on a Book Cover

Making a picture book cover and trying to not ~pass away~

This morning, I received a very exciting e-mail in my inbox:

In which I basically responded with:

If you don’t know already, late last year I wrapped up working on my SECOND author/illustrator picture book!! I’m soooo proud of this one and I’ve been itching to share about it for the past year.

The book is titled:

Pretty sick title right?

If the title wasn’t clear enough, here is a very short summary that my very smart editor wrote for this book:

When a mysterious invite addressed to “Cutie” arrives in the mail, a young girl follows the mailman through the hedges and discovers a dazzling, secret world of . . . pigs.

Pigs on bikes.

Pigs in bakeries.

Pigs on their way to a mansion.

Author-illustrator Lian Cho delivers a hilarious tale filled with chase scenes and cake heists within a wildly imagined world.

I’m so proud of this book, it’s really freaking funny and I know it’s hard to believe me because I’m the one who wrote the damn thing, but I’m still going to say it! The book is freaking hilarious and I fear I’ll never be able to top this.

Anyways, here is a brief glimpse into the process of illustrating the cover for this book.

Step One: IRL sketches

First I worked on thumbnailing out as many ideas as I could in my sketchbook. The basic points I wanted to hit with this cover was:

1. A lot of pigs (There are close to 500 pigs in this book *gasp*)

2. A party vibe that would make anyone who saw it feel intense FOMO (and buy the book as a result)

3. Something that would make someone walking by do a double take and chuckle

Here are the sketches I came up with first:

These sketches happened while Adam and I were on our 13th hour of binging Survivor for the first time.

Below are some covers I was drawing inspiration from:

There are a lot of pages in the book that have fun borders and I wanted to play with the idea of having a fun border on the cover.

Step Two: Digital sketches

From these thumbnails, I then moved over to my trusty iPad and started drawing out as many roughs of the cover as I could. Here are the ones that showed some potential:

Step Three: Tighten up those babies

From there, I narrowed it down to these sketches and tightened up the sketches.

Step Four: Add a little snazzy color!

Below are the five sketches I sent over to my editor:

Step Five: Receive positive feedback

My editor got back to me and told me she and the team LOVED sketch number C and just asked if I could tweak the colors slightly.

That’s good right? Nice and easy!

Step Six: WRONG! Unfortunately, I am too stubborn

Part of me was weirdly stuck on sketch number E, so I decided that I was going to be stubborn and try to come up with a better cover than sketch C.

Sketch C seemed so… obvious! And it was TOO EASY to get to that solution!

I am a masochist and needed more suffering!!

So I went back to the drawing board (despite my editor basically telling me the cover I came up with was already perfect).

I became fixated on this idea I had in the beginning where the main character sees the pigs peeking out of the hedge, but I was struggling to find a way to fit all the text in nicely and to also incorporate a border.

Step Seven: Enlist help from my poor friends

Stuck in a self dug hole of my own masochism, I texted my friends for help and my very nice friend Monica suggested changing the type and her position to fit in the composition nicer:

Monica’s very quick mock up

Meanwhile my friend Jess, who had way too much time on her hands, sketched up a WHOLE ASS SKETCH and basically spelled out my doom:

I hate you Jess this sketch is perfect.

Yea, she basically screwed me with this sketch because there was just NO WAY I could match what she did. She literally outdrew MY book. RUDE!!

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Anyways, this is a commercial break that Jess’ debut book is coming out in March and it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever read (aside from my books of course) plus the art is mindblowingly unique and luscious.

If you preorder her book now, you’ll also get a free print!

Okay commercial break over.

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Step Eight of my Self Inflicted Torture: Well shit.

Hopefully that commercial break was enough for you to forget about what Jess’ sketch looked like, because here is what I came up with after toiling for hours and hours attempting to create something I could like as much as I liked Jess’ sketch (without copying her too much).

Unfortunately, it just was not coming together. It was cute but it just didn’t have the same pizzazz as my original idea. It also just felt too Christmas-sy.

*sigh*

Step Nine: Abandon Ship!

So… I admitted defeat and went back to my original idea.

After spending so much time pursuing an idea that turned out to be kinda poo poo, my original idea now seemed great! A genius idea!!! What an idiot I was to doubt myself!

It’s almost as if my editor knows what she’s doing and believes in me!

I just need to believe in myself lol.

Step Ten: I guess things can come easy sometimes…

Here’s the revised color study of the cover.

My editor is a genius for suggesting a green background. It’s perfect.

Finally, I am pleased to announce that…

Yup, this book comes out right before Halloween! I will be expecting a lot of you to dress up as piggies for Halloween this year.

Just like last year, I’ll be having a bunch of pre-order incentives and goodies up for grabs! There will also hopefully be a fun book launch as well as hopefully festival appearances for this book. There will of course be a lot of behind the scenes posts on Substack. I can’t wait to make everyone laugh.

Also, I just realized, this is my 99th post on Substack!!!

We’re one post away from 100 and I thought we would celebrate with a little discount on paid subscriptions! You can now get $5 off an annual subscription with this discount below:

If you enjoyed this post, many of my paid posts are similar to this and offer a look inside books that I’m not technically allowed to share publicly yet.

Thanks for sticking around fellas.

Stay tuned for more piggy content.