Here’s our new cover, of the seventh book, launching Oct 9th in the UK & Ireland with David Fickling Books: Adventuremice: Mousehole to the Centre of the Earth!
I loved the Jules Verne story when I was little, and even (unsuccessfully) tried to dig to China and start my own tour company, so this story was loads of fun to create. Who knows what lost worlds – even miniature ones – exist below the earth’s crust???
Here’s the back cover, with a new machine, driven by… oh look, is this a reappearance of Professor Quatermouse? What could possibly go wrong?
Some of the covers come together as if by magic, but this one was quite hard work! We started with this sketch by Philip (left), and I reinterpreted it with this painting (right).
I tweaked that cover quite intensively in Photoshop, starting with a scan of this watercolour painting, below. I was thinking we might have other books that are lush and green, so I was trying to capture a sense of underground earthiness and soil. But it just looked too… brown, and our designer Katie Taylor and the marketing team weren’t going for it. That was okay, I wasn’t that sure about it either.
So I went back to the drawing board and tried to create a mysterious-looking cavern. I was rather pleased with how that came out! It looked a little different to anything I’d painted before, and reminded me of some vintage Tolkien illustrations, like I might meet Gollum lurking by a pool just around the corner.
I liked Fledermaus and Pedro with the pterodactyl in the first version, they just seemed to be pointing the wrong direction, away from where you open the book. And I have to be careful about flipping it in Photoshop, because Pedro only has a brown spot on one of his eyes and that can’t swap over. In the end, I just repainted the whole thing on a separate piece of paper, like this, so I could position and resize it later.
And I had a lot of fun designing the Boring Machine (which is not at all boring)! I might post more about that in a future blog, Adventuremice tech is always fun. When Ivy builds machines, they’re very reliable, but when Professor Quatermouse (Uncle Bernie) assembles them… not so much.
If you love the Adventuremice books and plan to get this one, it would be a huge help to us and to booksellers if you could pre-order it! That way the booksellers know how many to stock, and in the industry, there’s a big deal made of ‘first-week sales’, which helps us to keep making more books. So please pre-order if you can, before the book launches in October! (And hopefully our US publisher, Kane Miller Books, will publish it not too long after!)
And, as always, you can find out more about the Adventuremice and discover lots of fun, free activities on the website, Adventuremice.com!
