Jacket sketch for Old Red Shoe

As I blogged about here, recently I finished the illustrations for my book What Can You Do with an Old Red Shoe?... the next step after the interior illustrations are painted is to make a jacket sketch. Some people do this earlier on I think, but I tend to always do it last, after the characters have been worked out and I know what the inside of the book is going to look like.

For this book, I thought the jacket sketch should reflect the fact that most of the interior illustrations are spots, so I started by sketching some spots of the characters here:



The interior layout also has a lot of borders that tie each spread together. Again I thought the jacket should refelct the interior design by having a border too, so I loosely sketched these outlines around the spots I'd drawn (on a seperate piece of tracing paper):



Once I scanned the sketch and opened it in Photoshop, I added some tones to the background border:



Combining all elements, I came up with a few different variations for the jacket:



Here I reduced the amount of characters on the layout, and blew them up a bit:



Here I did an additional border, to see what that would look like:



Now I wait to see what my editor says! Which one do you like best?