The Lie Tree

Here’s my cover art for the US edition of Frances Hardinge’s The Lie Tree.

I also did the cover art for the US edition of her previous book, The Cuckoo Song (which you can see here), and although this isn’t a sequel to it, the publisher wanted to keep the design of this one similar.  Art director Maria Middleton, suggested a few initial ideas: a big scary-looking tree, perhaps with swirls of lies around it; a piece of fruit, maybe an apple, with a bite taken out of it; a rotten fruit with lies scratched into the side of it.  With that as a starting point I played around with some rough sketches.

They liked sketches 1D, 2A and 1B and it was strongly felt that there should be some tree element in the composition, so it was suggested that we could try combining compositions 1D and 2A.

Sketch A was chosen for the final composition.  Originally the apple was just red, but to push it further from the Twilight book cover image it was decided to add a little bit of green into it.  Here’s the original and another version with more green in it.

The Lie Tree is out now and the US edition is published by Amulet Books.