Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials

Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials

In 2019 I received my dream job! to illustrate new cover editions of Philip Pullman's His dark materials Trilogy.
Here is the final cover for the first book in that trilogy 'Northern Lights' and below I will show you the rough stages I went through to come to this final design.

The first stage when I design a cover or covers, is to rough out 3-4 ideas which I then send to the publisher. They will then decide which they prefer.
I wanted to focus of Iorek the bear for this cover, because he is such a visual character in this book his shape lent well for some interesting compositions.

Because this is a wrap around cover, I wanted to make sure I make that most of that shape and so make the design flow around the book. I do this stage without colour so that I can see with just line work how it will work.

For these covers there was lots of foiling, so I drew all the silver an gold on seperate layers and then everything else is merged. When you have quite a detailed image, it works well to keep the colours limited so not to overwhelm the design.