So, a lot of times on newer picture books illustrators like to play around with the idea of having a different drawing or a different design on the jacket of the book than they have on the printed hardcover of the book, which is called a case cover. So I was thinking about, I knew this was a special book to me so I knew I wanted to do something unique and special for the case cover.
I was trying to figure out what was that going to be, so in other words if you, this is the outer paper of the book, the book jacket, so if you take off the jacket of this book you know, on this jacket you have you know the girl and the wolf pup on this side of the jacket and one of the adult wolves back here. So in a way it’s sort of a continuous piece if you look at it like this.
I wanted to tell a little bit of extra story on each piece, so this is a little bit of extra story about the girl and her family and sort of the bond that they have, the bonds that they have together. And on this side of the case cover are the wolves, different scenes showing the wolves bonding amongst the pack of wolves, so.
I just felt like it would have been a fun place to show … because there’s not a lot of scenes where you see the family together or you see the girl interacting with their dog, or you see the wolves and the wolf pup together. So I wanted to show a little bit, it could be before the story, it could be after the story. But there’s one panel right here where the girl is looking out and she sees a wolf howling in the distance.
And right here the wolf mother and pup are looking out and they see some smoke coming from the chimney of the house so they’re sort of aware of each other in that, in the context of where they live and nature and that there are other beings out there around them, so.
Whenever I go talk about the book I always point that out and I always sort of tell kids that always look underneath the jackets.