A Writer's Week #119: Drawing Up a Plan

 Since I've resumed posting this year, I've been talking about refreshing the Deliverers Series brand in order to breathe new life into the books ahead of the intended release of Book 4 by the end of 2023. The refresh will include a redesign of the blog, including a new propriety domain name, new book trailers, and new marketing.

The biggest and most important change is going to be a complete redesign of the books themselves. That includes new cover illustrations, titles, maps, chapter heading illustrations, and chapter title fonts. I searched for an illustrator for a while, and I found a cracking good one. Her name is Emily Hurst Pritchett, and she is based in Boston. She is a seasoned illustrator with a number of book covers to her credit, along with numerous other projects each year.

I really love her illustrations, and I think her style is perfect for the series. She's already started on Sharky and the Jewel. Artwork for all three books should be completed by early summer. Here are several examples of her work:

Here's the bio from her website:

Emily was raised on a steady diet of animation and comic books that built her love of storytelling through art. She studied illustration at Brigham Young University. She has illustrated picture books, middle-grade books, and role-playing game materials, including three Christmas books and two Christmas projects based on Dungeons and Dragons. She especially enjoys working on any fantasy story.

Emily currently lives in Boston with her husband and two children, where she enjoys sketching the interesting characters she meets on the street and admiring old churches. She fills her time with reading, video games, Dungeons & Dragons, and acting in community theater. Her dream is to travel through Italy, where she will also sketch interesting characters and admire old churches.

Check out her collaboration with her husband Luke, a physicist and aspiring poet, at haiku.emilypritchettart.com. 

In my next post I'll share some proposal sketches that Emily prepared from which I chose a couple to work up into more polished samples.