Luke Edward Hall on designing covers for the Faber YA Illustrated Classics Editions of E. M. Forster’s Maurice and A Room With a View.
When I first discussed this project with Faber Children’s Art Director Emma Eldridge, we spoke about making very zingy cover drawings, full of colour but also pared-back, with bold lines. These books are part of Faber’s Young Adult Illustrated Classics series, and whilst the magic of these stories is that they are loved by people of all ages, we knew that we wanted to make them particularly appealing to younger audiences.
Maurice is a book that means a lot of different things to a lot of people.
It feels rather charged, and I was very aware of this feeling whilst working on the illustrations. Although completed in 1914, Maurice wasn’t published in Forster’s lifetime. It is a groundbreaking work of gay literature, and I have many editions on my bookshelf at home, all with very different covers. We wanted our versions to be poppy, playful and with a feeling of optimism about them. Maurice at its heart is a novel about self-acceptance. I was imagining a case in which this story might be completely new to a younger reader. . . I loved the idea of this person being drawn to Maurice’s cover in a bookshop, hopefully picking up the book, then treasuring the story within.
I started with simple sketches in my sketchbook, made with black pen and pencil.
This stage was mainly about trying out different situations and poses for the characters in both Maurice and A Room with a View. We eventually settled on Maurice and Clive about to kiss, which I was very happy about, and Lucy and George embracing in front of a view of Florence’s skyline. These early sketches incorporated my hand-drawn titles, too.
I then moved into watercolour, at first working only in blue.
I altered the titles at this stage, imitating a font with my own hand.
We then wondered if we wanted to try a slightly more sketchy approach, so I switched to colouring pencils.
Deciding that we wanted more colour, as well as a block colour background, I added a different shade of blue, purple and red to the palette of Maurice.
Back to the drawing board! And back to watercolour.
We decided that we preferred the smoothness and painterly nature of watercolour. It also worked much better for the wash of colour in the background.
We arrived at the final cover of Maurice, and the decision was made to replace my hand-drawn title and authors’ names with typographic versions.
Having got Maurice right, we moved on to A Room with a View, which turned out to be a more straightforward ride as we had worked out the best approach with Maurice previously, and we knew that we wanted both covers to have a similar feeling. Again we see an earlier try, all in blue, but as with Maurice we ended up developing a limited palette of colours.
The YA Illustrated Editions of Maurice and A Room With a View are available now.
Read more Book Cover Design articles from the Faber Journal.
See all Luke’s sketches in the gallery below:
