Once you put out a book, it is hard to step back and look at it objectively. Recently a blogger friend saw the preview of the book and felt that the pictures of the cuts of meat were quite disturbing and it made her feel negatively about the book. She is a vegetarian and doesn’t believe in eating animals. I was a bit taken aback by her reaction and felt terrible for a few days about it, as this book is in no way supposed to promote killing animals or eating meat, but more show the appreciation of the small farm and living off the land. I haven’t eaten meat in a couple years myself for similar reasons but understand that this is a part of farm culture which is why it is included in this book.

Ok, whew, now that I explained that let’s move on to the cover designs.

First, I just want to say I had a wonderful time working with Storey’s creative director Alethea Morrison on the process. Her thoughts and ideas were always so helpful and I really appreciated her feedback on everything throughout the long process.

My first thoughts for the cover were that I wanted to make something striking and bold that referenced “anatomy” in some way. I liked the idea of having a big strong silhouette of a recognizable farm object with everything contained inside. The first two use a barn shape and an egg in that way. The third was a different, more general looking cover.

Storey really liked the barn silhouette but wanted to add more of the curiosity element. They suggested adding captions to the imagery. They also had me change the sizes and placement of some of the text for legibility and heirarchy reasons. Here was the final version.

A month and a half went by and Storey brings my cover to New York to present the seasons books to Workman Publishing which they are a subsidiary of. Peter Workman did not like my cover as much as we did. He felt it wasn’t conveying the breadth of the book and that it looked like a straight-up art book. The cover needed to show it was also an informational book. They also decided to change the book from hardcover to softcover due to the amount of stores that carry softcover versus hardcover. Needless to say I was extremely disappointed.

I went back to the drawing board and worked with Alethea on a new idea. Since it was going to now be a softcover book I wanted to figure out something that still felt thick and special. We talked about getting thicker textured stock for the cover and I came up with the idea of using a chipboard and printing one color on it. I tried two new versions. The first was more of a scene that had callouts all over it. The second was using the chipboard and printing two colors – brown and white and using a tape binding. Here’s what those versions looked like:

We really liked the idea of the chipboard cover and Alethea presented that to the Storey team. As you know, this was not the end. Everyone seemed to miss color on this cover. Since the book has so much color inside, why not show that on the outside. I agreed that this was something we needed to address. I re did the cover again, going back to the look of the third cover in the very first round of designs. I added as many callouts and titles as possible showing the breadth of information. Alethea sent me a variety of paper samples that had texture in them so we would be able to keep that tactile quality and we decided to make the book have flaps so that the cover would feel heavier. I decided to keep the palette limited to reds and pinks and oranges on green. Once the cover was done, I continued the same design style to the back and made a fun chicken patterns in bright yellows for inside cover. As you might have noticed, the cover copy changed quite a bit through the process as well but ultimately I think adding the words “curious” and “country” were great choices.

In the end, I think this was the best cover of them all. I did love that first barn silhouette version but I do think the clutter of the final cover is more intriguing. What do you think?

Pick up a copy right here.

I’m so happy today to be sharing a big project I’ve been working on for the past year. It’s a book I wrote and illustrated called Farm Anatomy. It’s 224 pages of paintings, mostly diagrams and charts, with some writing about all the parts of a farm. For example, there are illustrations that show the parts of a pig, kinds of tractors, varieties of barns, all the different squash, bugs that are good and bad for your garden, and a chart of all the tools you can find on a farm. There’s also recipes, a few craft projects and lots of how-tos (how to make cheese, split wood, cut up a chicken, make a rag rug, can tomatoes…). It comes out October 1st from Storey Publishing.

My husband Matt grew up on a farm in the tiny town of Tabor, Iowa where they raised chickens and goats and Angora rabbits. They had a plot of land they rented to another farmer who alternated growing corn and soybean. What was grown in the garden and small orchard was harvested, canned and stored in their root cellar. They have a huge barn and a corn crib and a bunch of unused buildings filled with rusty equipment. It’s about as picturesque as you can get. His father still lives there today. I’ve visited a large handful of times and each time I go I feel like I’m in another world, totally out of my element. I grew up in New York City and only left for college before coming back to reside in Brooklyn. Deciding to work on this book came out of the desire to better understand this unfamiliar world. I’m intrigued and excited by so many things that are just regular to Matt, like wind mills that pump water, the patterns of the contour plowing, or even just eating fresh eggs.

My research was done mostly from other Storey books. They have an amazing collection of titles about everything you can think of about country living. I made an outline about what I wanted to include in the book and as I kept reading, it got longer and longer. Once I learned what a combine did, I wanted to see how the inside worked. When I saw how many colorful varieties of carrots there are, it made me want to also draw the varieties of peppers and squash and beans. Storey was completely open in letting me develop everything I wanted to include and were happy to fill in the blanks when I needed more information. They were amazingly knowledgeable and so helpful in gearing me in other directions I wouldn’t have thought of. Everything was looked over by an expert to make sure I had gotten it right which eased my nerves about not being an expert myself.

The book took a little less than a year to complete. I’ll share more of the process of making the artwork and the cover and doing all of the handwritten text (whew!) another time. It was quite a process and I had a lot of help from Leah Goren (who was supposed to be my assistant for this blog but quickly changed into my painting helper).

And while this book only skims the surface, I’m happy to say there’s a lot of information packed inside. I learned so much from this project and am so proud of the results. While I’ve authored and illustrated books before, this book is different because it’s all me. It feels very personal even though it’s about a lifestyle I am still learning about. Thanks so much for taking a look and I hope you like it! It comes out October 1st but you can pre-order it on Amazon or Indiebound. More soon! xo

(Mine is the buzzing tree below for the TV on the Radio song Dancing Choose.

Matt flew here from Chicago to set up a makeshift photo studio in my apartment. We rented fancy equipment: a camera that could take super big high resolution images, a tripod, light meter and a series of lights. Matt got a long lesson from the talented photographer Kipling Swehla before we started. After setting it all up, we basically had no living room for four days. My poor husband was very nice to put up with ducking every time he had to walk through. We had over 100 sketchbooks from artists from around the world. They had been shipped to me via Fed Ex. My Fed Ex guy knows me very well now. I am extremely thankful for the artists for having the courage to ship these precious books overseas and to Fed Ex for not losing any of them!

Aside from shooting the interiors of the sketchbooks, we wanted to shoot some ideas for the cover. Our idea was to show the exteriors of the sketchbooks since we were weren’t showing any of the those inside the book. We set up a series of different piles, stacks, and configurations with the books. After we shot these Jenny worked on creating a series of cover designs using those photos and some handdrawn type I made. Here are some of those designs:

Initially I was really excited about these designs. I couldn’t even decide which one I liked the best. But after a couple days of looking at them I felt like something was missing, they didn’t feel handmade enough. Since the book was about sketches, these seemed too clean somehow. Jenny was slightly frustrated with my change of heart but we decided to work on another set that were all about feeling tactile. Here are those designs:

This one was made by cutting out letters and placing Julia Pott’s sketch behind it.

This one was a rubbing with colored pencil.

And then we made this one and I fell in love.

I felt like this cover was simple and beautiful. I pushed for it. But ultimately we all felt that it didn’t convey what the book was about.

We revisited all of the designs again and went back to the original set on suggestion of my editor Mary Ann. We took our favorite of the bunch and added more handwritten lettering and somehow it came together better:

As a cover wrap I’m really happy with it. I love how the books continue to the back.

What do you think? Which cover would you have picked?

As requested by so many of you, here is the full list of artists in the book:
Ana Benaroya, Sophie Blackall, Jill Bliss, Sam Bosma, Calef Brown, Tad Carpenter, Jen Corace, Christian Defilippo, Rob Dunlavey, Austin English, Camilla Engman, Ben Finer, Sarajo Frieden, Karen Klassen, Chad Kouri, Abbey Hendrickson, Lars Henkel, Jessica Hische, Katy Horan, Meg Hunt, Matt Leines, Renata Liwska, Mike Lowery, Alex Lukas, Grady McFerrin, Ted McGrath, Will Miller, Andy J. Miller, Mark Mulroney, Lauren Nassef, Anders Nilsen, Laura Park, Leif Parsons, Claudia Pearson, Mike Perry, Julia Pott, Catell Ronca, Julia Rothman, Carmen Segovia, Lizzy Stewart, Mike Sudal, Isaac Tobin, Jenny Volvovski, Ben Voss

You can now pre-order the book right here
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