Designing the book cover

After a few rounds of brainstorming for the title, my publisher narrowed down to this one: "EVA GOES SOLO". No, not the Solo in Indonesia but solo as in alone because this book contains short stories about me adapting to life in Japan a few years ago when the pets were not born yet. They liked idea no.4.

So the next step was to ink and colour it. So here were some ideas on how to treat the plain white background.

Ali from my Patreon (now it's like my mini fan club) suggested to have a table and my publisher liked the idea initially...

Yes, I meant "initially" because after speaking to retailers, they changed their mind and wanted a white background so the cover can pop up from the shelves.

It looked rather plain to me like a novel instead of a comic book, so I suggested 2 different treatments: drawings in the background or spot UV the bamboos. Spot UV is a special treatment whereby the surface is coated with a glossy finish. I preferred spot UV on my drawings but I didn't want to redraw everything as the treatment required certain line thickness in order to have the UV coated properly.

Turned out that the printer can auto-adjust to print just the thicker lines and the result was pretty ok. Except that it had to be kept off the edges and folds so I had to go back to adjust the drawings and thicken some lines.

After nearly 2 weeks of ding-dong to and fro adjustments, and another 1 week of printing, we finally saw the end product! Well sort of... because I haven't got the chance to see it personally yet so I'll be seeing it together with my fans in Malaysia for the first time at Kuala Lumpur this weekend (10-11 Sep)!

I'll be having a panel discussion with the famous Malaysian doodle and comic artist, Chee Ming Boey, to talk about the Art of Biography at the Cooler Lumpur Festival @ Publika (yeah, we love to draw and talk about ourselves :P ), followed by a brief talk and demo at MPH Mid Valley. On Sunday, I'll be heading to Koncent at Petaling Jaya, followed by Borders at The Curve.

I'd also be giving away 1 Matcha cushion at each location (except Cooler Lumpur) ! Will you be that lucky fan? See you!!!