My take on illustrated romance book covers

As I’d love to work on romance book covers, I took advantage of the latest season of the AOI Inside Illustration course to create a romance cover for a dummy book. 

In this blog post, I will share the brief, inspiration, and process of creating the cover.

The brief

I’ve been a member of the AOI since I started freelancing. In the last few years, they introduced mini in-depth courses focusing on a different area of illustration for each season. The latest season is all about publishing. 

The AOI’s multi-platform course includes webinars where industry experts share wisdom on current illustration topics. I took part in the webinar with Ellie Game, Deputy Art Director at HarperCollins. 

As part of the webinar, you are offered the opportunity to respond to a brief set by the session presenter. 

The brief asked you to take one of your existing illustrations and mock it up into a book cover with the liberty of inventing a book title.

Where did the inspiration for the cover come from

I’ve noticed that romance and fiction book covers often use travel illustrations, one of my focus areas. So I decided to use an illustration I was working on a few days prior to the talk and adapt it to a book cover. It’s a travel illustration of Syracuse in Sicily.

Designing the book cover

This is the sketch showing also the space to accommodate the title and author name.

The funniest part was coming up with a title and a story for the book.

I decided that the protagonist of my book was Mia, a woman craving a fresh start who, on the spur of the moment, decides to book a one-way flight to Sicily to reinvent her life. I believed this was enough to start thinking about the title. My final choice fell on “The Sicilian Getaway”.

Time to choose the fonts. I chose handwritten, imperfect fonts to match the story and genre of the book cover I was creating.

I’ve added a brief summary of the story to the cover to spark the reader’s curiosity, as it’s common with many illustrated romance book covers.

I mocked up the final image into a book cover, et voilà!

That’s all for now, until next time!

This book cover illustration is one of the projects I loved the most working on lately. So if you are reading this post and are currently working on a book cover project for which I could be a great fit, why don’t we chat?

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