You know those stories?
The ones where people band together and pull something off—usually in a major time crunch?
Like how animators slept under their desks during the making of Toy Story because Pixar needed a hit, or how the kids in The Babysitters Club rallied together to paint the neighbor's greenhouse?
Everything gets a little nuts, but in the end, sometimes you pull it off, and it’s kind of magical?
I love those stories.
The process of creating the Special Edition Covers and Endpapers felt a lot like that to me.
Jessie and I had kind of gotten used to the self-publishing world, where covers were “ready when they were ready.” But suddenly, there were deadlines—especially on this project, with custom cloth hardcovers, gold foil, coloured bookmark ribbons, full-colour endpapers, and a limited edition print run.
As always, Jessie had a clear vision and sent me these references. From there, it was up to me to translate that into how I wanted my original covers to be represented.
This was all new to me. I hadn’t worked in this style before or with gold foil on cloth, which required a specific kind of treatment. You couldn’t use anything too detailed, as the lines might bleed, but you also didn’t want large, flat areas of gold—so that was a fun challenge to figure out.
In the end, I sketched a layout in Procreate, got the general concept approved by Jessie, and then built everything in Adobe Illustrator using vectors.
The covers were our priority since we needed to get the samples approved to ensure everything translated well to foil and cloth. After that, I moved on to the Endpapers.
Jessie had this vision of a board game where every tile told a piece of the story and in theory, I was like WOW I LOVE... but in reality, I was like waaaait so like… 40+ artworks… x 3…. In how many weeks? Hence why it was my “crunch time story.”
Jessie and the wonderful Maddi, who works with her, would map out all the significant moments from each book and imagine how to represent them visually. They’d send me their ideas, and I would sketch each moment, get their feedback, and once it was green-lit, I’d flesh it out with colour.
The board game layout took a few iterations before we landed on something we liked.
This process meant drawing late into the night and waking up VERY early (note: I’m not a morning person) on a Saturday just to get the seat I wanted at my favorite cafe—the one on the corner by the window—to draw. It also meant that when I tried to do a push-up during a training session, my entire body collapsed to the floor cause my wrists were like 'nah.'
It meant that all my dreams during that time were about endpaper scenes. I vaguely remember being a dramatic princess about needing clarity on something from Maddi and Jessie, but honestly, who remembers?
