Book Cover
Client: Weiser Books, 2024
The Brief
The Art Director at Weiser Books approached me to create a cover for Kris Spisak’s Becoming Baba Yaga. We jumped on several calls to explore directions. Slavic folk art was the obvious starting point, but the category is drowning in it. I made the case that another folk-style cover would blend into the background instead of standing out.
The Solution
I proposed an Art Nouveau approach: elegant, feminine, and structured, but pushed through my trademark feral color palettes. It offered that mythic energy the book needed without falling back on the predictable visual tropes already flooding the category.
The AD loved it. The author loved it. And when I casually mentioned how frontispiece illustrations could elevate the interior, they didn’t hesitate. The budget doubled, and I got to create fifteen additional black-and-white pieces to round out the visual world of the book.
Spot Illustrations
