Deviant

Here’s the cover art I did for a YA novel for Abrams Books called Deviant by Adrian Mckinty, which should be out in October.

Below is the finished cover design done by Maria T. Middleton, a senior designer for Abrams Books who art directed this project.  The concept for the cover went through a lot of changes from the initial idea in the brief to this final version.  One major change was that originally the cover was going to feature the main character, but it was later decided that he should be left out.  I may write a more detailed post about this with the rough sketches I did at a later date…

One of the things we looked at for inspiration for this ‘hands’ idea was the scene from the film Labyrinth when Jennifer Connelly’s character falls down the tunnel filled with hands – it turned out that Labyrinth was a favourite of both of ours.  It was decided at the outset that one of the hands should be pulling down on one of the letters so we had to work closely together to work out the composition and positioning of the hands.