I am completely spellbound by these cover illustrations that comics artist and illustrator Jillian Tamaki has created for some new Penguin editions:
The Emma jacket is lovely (and there's a sweet one for The Secret Garden, which we were just discussing the other day!) but I love the Black Beauty embroidery the most.
It's really unbelievably, almost cruelly beautiful...
Jillian's blog has more info, and some really fun-to-peek-at process photos of the embroideries in progress. What a multimedia wonder she is!
I read one of her books, Skim (written by her cousin, Mariko Tamaki) a few years back and it's one of those books that is so truthful and honest, it has a piercing loveliness.
My friend Devlin, who is always showing me beautiful things, tipped me off about the mention of these on the D+Q blog, and I was just blown over - especially considering the timing. I'm completely humbled by the beauty of these covers, especially because I'm currently doing the final bits of work to complete the cover painting for my first children's book.
(More on that later!)
I feel like I've been living in this cover painting for several months now (in addition to working on the Alice paintings.)
All I can do is hope it's even a percentage as nice as these stitched wonders!
