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vcmwI think way more than any non-publishing person should about things like picture books, cover artists, and the use of cover art to market books and authors. Also about the way some excellent artists cross categories to work in cover art, picture books, etc. while others do not, or do so only at some points in their careers.
Partly this could be explained by my years as a children's bookseller and public library employee, but that would be putting the cart before the horse: I was attracted to those fields in part because I had been obsessively cataloging those types of relations for years and years.
I remember, for example, very distinctively thinking when Tanya Huff's Quarters books came out with covers by Jody Lee - "oh, they're trying to cross market her more strongly to fans of Mercedes Lackey - good for her, she deserves the sales if it works." I was 13 or just barely 14 then, and I'd been tracking stuff like that for years. I have no idea why.
As a kid of 10 I thought of Trina Schart Hyman more as a cover artist than as a picture book artist, because it had been years since I'd been staring breathlessly at her illustrations for Saint George and the Dragon, but I had read Dealing with Dragons and its sequels abundant times. But I didn't realize she'd done black and white interior art too until I found an old hardcover copy of A Walk out of the World. I wonder how many career artists have a "black and white interior art" phase these days? And is it more now than it was 5 or 10 years ago, with the increased prevelance of chapter heading art and the occasional plate in elementary and middle grade fantasies? (And thank you Tony DiTerlizzi, because unfairly or not I credit Spiderwick for a lot of that - well, Spiderwick and Harry Potter.)
I know that Leo and Diane Dillon have done well respected cover art, but whenever I see their work on a book cover I always feel a bit shocked (delighted by the image, but shocked) because they are so strongly picture book artists in my mind. Which is odd because while I love Kinuko Craft's picture book art endlessly, it seems equally or more natural to see her work on book covers - but it's her occasional non fantasy covers (like the ones for at least one paperback edition of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander books) that suprise me the most.
Actually, this whole ramble is inspired by the fact that I found a used library copy of the original 1st edition hardcover of Diane Duane's So You Want to be a Wizard at a thrift store. And I stared at the cover image, which I had never seen before (I have seen umpteen different covers for the Young Wizard books, but never the original hardcover), and went: my gosh, that's pretty great. The layout is dynamic and obviously says "fantasy" without being cheesy, the characters look plausibly like I'd imagine them, and it conveys the impact of a scene from the book without being literal (elements of a few related scenes overlapped in a way that conveyed narrative without being exact). And so I flipped to find the author credit. And it's David Wiesner. To which you can only go, of course, as he has won plenty of awards and Caldecott medals and so forth. I'd had no idea he ever did chapter book cover art, and I don't imagine he does it now.
My assumption was that someone must really have wanted Diane Duane's book to succeed and shelled out the big bucks for David Wiesner but then I wondered if he had the huge presence way back then that he does now. Maybe he was just out of art school and happy to get the work. I dunno, but I'm happy to have the book, library plastic cover and all, on my shelf.
Partly this could be explained by my years as a children's bookseller and public library employee, but that would be putting the cart before the horse: I was attracted to those fields in part because I had been obsessively cataloging those types of relations for years and years.
I remember, for example, very distinctively thinking when Tanya Huff's Quarters books came out with covers by Jody Lee - "oh, they're trying to cross market her more strongly to fans of Mercedes Lackey - good for her, she deserves the sales if it works." I was 13 or just barely 14 then, and I'd been tracking stuff like that for years. I have no idea why.
As a kid of 10 I thought of Trina Schart Hyman more as a cover artist than as a picture book artist, because it had been years since I'd been staring breathlessly at her illustrations for Saint George and the Dragon, but I had read Dealing with Dragons and its sequels abundant times. But I didn't realize she'd done black and white interior art too until I found an old hardcover copy of A Walk out of the World. I wonder how many career artists have a "black and white interior art" phase these days? And is it more now than it was 5 or 10 years ago, with the increased prevelance of chapter heading art and the occasional plate in elementary and middle grade fantasies? (And thank you Tony DiTerlizzi, because unfairly or not I credit Spiderwick for a lot of that - well, Spiderwick and Harry Potter.)
I know that Leo and Diane Dillon have done well respected cover art, but whenever I see their work on a book cover I always feel a bit shocked (delighted by the image, but shocked) because they are so strongly picture book artists in my mind. Which is odd because while I love Kinuko Craft's picture book art endlessly, it seems equally or more natural to see her work on book covers - but it's her occasional non fantasy covers (like the ones for at least one paperback edition of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander books) that suprise me the most.
Actually, this whole ramble is inspired by the fact that I found a used library copy of the original 1st edition hardcover of Diane Duane's So You Want to be a Wizard at a thrift store. And I stared at the cover image, which I had never seen before (I have seen umpteen different covers for the Young Wizard books, but never the original hardcover), and went: my gosh, that's pretty great. The layout is dynamic and obviously says "fantasy" without being cheesy, the characters look plausibly like I'd imagine them, and it conveys the impact of a scene from the book without being literal (elements of a few related scenes overlapped in a way that conveyed narrative without being exact). And so I flipped to find the author credit. And it's David Wiesner. To which you can only go, of course, as he has won plenty of awards and Caldecott medals and so forth. I'd had no idea he ever did chapter book cover art, and I don't imagine he does it now.
My assumption was that someone must really have wanted Diane Duane's book to succeed and shelled out the big bucks for David Wiesner but then I wondered if he had the huge presence way back then that he does now. Maybe he was just out of art school and happy to get the work. I dunno, but I'm happy to have the book, library plastic cover and all, on my shelf.
