Reading · Am I Doing This Right?

OMG!! You guys, I’m soooo excited for this book to release!!!

It’s fast becoming one of my favorite books I’ve made. I mean, what’s not to like? It’s filled with silly characters, cheese, brotherly love and lots of PIZZA. I love pizza and this book is for all those out there who love pizza just like me.

I had so much fun painting this book as I decided to experiment with purely acrylic for the art. I’d used acrylic previously before on 100 Mighty Dragons All Named Broccoli, but I’d paired it with colored pencil. This time, it was pure acrylic and I had a blast!

Here’s a sneak peek at what the actual paintings look like on paper:

Well, since the cover has been revealed, I thought I’d run everybody through the process of making this cover!

As always, I started out with thumbnail sketching in my sketchbook just to get all our ideas out.

The main points I wanted to get across with this cover were:

There is pizza
The pizza is very BIG
There are 3 brothers
One brother is doing everything and struggling while the other two are having a carefree and fun time

From there, I moved onto thumbnailing digitally to prepare to sketch digitally. Here were the ones that made the cut:

A problem I ran into/gave myself was that most pizza themed books all had the same covers out there. There was the text on the pizza in the center of the page. In an attempt to be ~different~ I tried my best to brainstorm ideas that would be different from the already existing ones:

Here are the final sketches that I sent in:

The top two were exploring covers without showing a big classic pizza and I gave up on the bottom two and said “fuck it, a big pizza is too classic.” Personally, I really liked top left and bottom right!

I sent these over to my editor and art director and waited…

And here’s the final cover sketch they chose:

IT’S CUTE and you know what, sometimes there’s no point in fixing what isn’t broken! So we forged ahead with the extra large pizza.

Once I got approval, next up was color. Here are the color studies I did at first:

However after so much fiddling, I felt like the background just looked kind of… boring! It needed a bit more pizzazz (hah! get it?). So I went back to my mood board and looked at a lot of different pizza boxes:

Then I had a lightbulb moment! All of these boxes included some sort of checkerboard border. What if I included a checkerboard border on my cover too? Here was the first iteration with a checkerboard border:

I played around with so many colors but just found that it was now too busy. So in an attempt to simplify, I made the border into one row of checkerboards instead of two:

AND FINALLY! She’s perfect!!!

From there, I moved onto sketching the whole jacket. After sketching, I painted everything in acrylic and scanned it in. And finally, here is the final cover in all her glory:

And because I really liked the way the rest of the jacket came out, you’re going to get the full sneak peek of the jacket! Here it is with the front flap and spine:

And the back cover and back flap:

Once I’d handed in the jacket, I still couldn’t get the idea of a Pizza Brothers pizza box out of my head. Then I remembered… if I wanted to, I could make a separate CASE COVER!

In case you’re not familiar with book jargon, picture books are typically wrapped in a jacket. This jacket is loose on the book and folds into the front and back of the book to stay in place. Underneath the jacket is the actual book itself, and sometimes, if the illustrator is ambitious and not too tired, they may make a secret cover on the case cover (the cover actually on the book under the jacket). The last time I’d made a separate case cover was for my first book Oh, Olive!, back when I had energy and life in my eyes.

The pizza box idea just wouldn’t leave my head though so I whipped up a case cover design that would go under the jacket as a surprise to readers:

It’s going to be so cute!! And just for fun, I mocked it up as an actual pizza box because I can’t help myself…

WHAT THE HELL THAT IS SO CUTE!!! Would you order a pizza at the Pizza Brothers pizza shop? I definitely would.

I’m really really proud of this book and I can’t wait for everyone to read it.

I’m going to try putting together some preorder incentives over the next month, but if you can’t wait and just want to preorder the book, you can do so at the links below.

And I know we have a couple booksellers in the crowd so if you’re a bookseller, it would be SO COOL if you could consider nominating The Pizza Brothers for the September/October Kids’ Indie Next List! The deadline is July 6th. I will be forever grateful and in your debt!

As a thank you for reading this, preordering or nominating this book, here is an early sketch of Antonio flexing with his mom tattoo: