Fangs to Amelia!

Re-designing the covers of much-loved little vampire’s books

Since last April I’ve been redesigning the books in the Amelia Fang range — the best-selling children’s stories about little vampire Amelia, written by Laura Ellen Anderson.

Delacorte Press (part of Penguin RandomHouse) couldn’t have chosen a better pairing; pumpkin-loving Laura and her little goth characters in their Halloween-all-the-time world, and me with my scratchy pens, love of ink and my leaning towards the murkier side of things. I would have DEVOURED these books as a 10 year old — well, let’s be honest — I love them now!

Laura’s books are already well known and very well loved, so this was a slightly unusual job for me; normally, I’m illustrating the entire cover, and even the insides of a book. Amelia has a wide and very eager following, so it felt like something of a responsibility to create her ‘new clothes’.

Aside from Laura’s characters, everything on the covers needed a re-design. The first job was to create from scratch the logo for the book range. This came very naturally; all spikes and jaunty angles, I drew up seven different options in my sketchbook, and transferred those to my iPad Pro…