With Love, Holly Book Cover Design

With my love of YA novels, I am passionate about book covers and the art and illustrations that are typically on them. I designed this book cover using my own original art to explore the ways my art would fit into the genre as book covers. Since I was coming up with this idea for the book myself, I struggled as I am not a novelist. The plot I envisioned for this was a romance story based on messages exchanged from Holly, the main character to her love interest. I also thought about the main character herself being a writer or having a journal and that features heavily in the story. This is how I titled this book, which comes from how I think she would sign off, "With Love, Holly"

I considered many different types of font choices as I thought about how I could best portray the sort of story this book was supposed to be about. I pictured this story to be a romantic comedy of sorts based on correspondence between the two main characters so I thought about typewriter-style fonts, handwritten-style fonts, and hybrids. I ended up considering fonts that reminded me of thorns and florals to hint at a hidden deception that may be happening in the plot later on.

Below is the process video of drawing the art on this cover, which I did using Procreate.

This drawing was themed after the Holly plant that I painted to pair with the figure.

I had fun with this drawing as I originally began it around the holidays and wanted to have a cozy, winter look with the sweater and the holly plant.

You may also like