A Face Like Glass

Yet another cover for a children’s book by Frances Hardinge for Amulet Books; I worked on A Face Like Glass at the same time as Fly By Night.  The approach for this was more straightforward and it was decided at the start that the publisher wanted to have a mask as the cover image.

Here are sketches for possible mask designs.

They wanted the shape of the mask to be more rounded and child-like to reflect the main character.

As with Fly By Night we tried a light solid background to start with.

Again it was decided that it would be better to have a lightly textured background instead.  Even though the mask in the book is plain black with just silver painted brows and mouth, and we’d already taken some artistic license by adding the decorative swirl on the cheek, the publisher wanted to push this even further and have more colour and decorative embellishments on the mask.

Here is the final mask design and some alternative textures I tried out for the background.

This US edition of A Face Like Glass from Amulet Books will be out in May next year.