I didn’t have time to do illustrations as elaborate as I’ve done for past Portland Opera productions, so I did caricatures of four of the characters in the show. I’m pretty pleased with how Pangloss came out.

Also, be sure to check out the #pdxcandide tag on twitter to get links to the drawings by all the other Portland cartoonists who were invited!

I’ll be at Stumptown Comics Fest in Portland, Oregon this weekend. If you’re there, please come up and say hi.

I’m planning a very light con schedule this summer, incidentally, since most of my time is going towards drawing the second Hereville book. But in May I’ll be appearing at VANcaf in Vancouver, Canada, and in August I’ll be at GeekGirlCon in Seattle, Washington.

And here are the two covers side by side:

I do think we succeeded pretty well at making a cover that was clearly part of the same series as book 1, without being the same cover over again.

So when I started work on the cover to book 2, everyone (“everyone” in this case meaning me, the folks at Abrams (my editor Sheila and book designer Chad Beckerman) and my agent Judy Hasen) were agreed that we wanted a cover that looked enough like book 1′s cover so that it would be obviously in the same series at a glance, but different enough so that no one would mistake it for the first book.

So, things to keep from book 1′s cover: Big round object. Tiny Mirka (or Mirkas). The banner for the title and author lettering. Things to be different: Everything else.

So I thought of every cover idea I could and sent quick sketches of those ideas to Abrams. Pretty much all of those ideas were variations on “meteor shooting through space, Mirka sitting on or being dragged along behind it.” But I also threw in a few not involving a meteor, because I didn’t want to forclose other possibilities, even though I was pretty sure we’d wind up with a meteor.

Then the folks at Abrams discussed it, or perhaps consulted their magic eight balls (a not-unlikely subject of a future Hereville cover), and agreed that they liked a shooting meteorite dragging a panicked Mirka best.

We also sent emails back and forth playing around with several color approaches. I showed them a few possibilities — sky blue, dark blue, red, etc — and although I was secretly hoping for red, I thought they’d choose blue (a more conservative choice), and I could live with that. To my delight, they chose red.

So now knowing the subject of the drawing and the color scheme, I did some more sketches and sent them to Abrams:

I do these sketches not only for Abrams’ sake but for my own — it’s hard for me to feel that I really know what I think about a cover composition unless I first sketch it out.

On Monday I’ll post the final cover art!

Question: I personally, loved Pig. I love how much expression he portrays before he even speaks. And then when he spoke for the first time, I think I was just as surprised as Mirka was! Can you talk about your process of creating him?

Answer: I knew that I wanted the witch to have a familiar, an animal friend. But it took me an amazingly long time to decide on a pig! I went through so many ideas… a cat, a ferret, a goat. In retrospect, it seems silly, because a pig is so perfect.

Because the pig is Mirka’s antagonist for so much of the story, I knew right away the pig had to be sort of prickly and easily annoyed. More of her personality came out as I sketched and wrote for her.

When it came time to draw the pig, I was so intimidated! It’s hard for me to draw a pig well. What helped me a lot was buying a half-dozen little realistic pig toys that I could hold in my hand and use as models for the character.

Click over to read the whole thing.

This shows both the rough sketch of the character on the page, and the completed drawing. (Jake hasn’t colored it yet, obviously).

Unfortunately, I don’t think the publisher wants me to show you any of that stuff just yet. Definitely not the cover. Maybe I’ll start showing pages next week.

Meanwhile, here’s a couple of outfits that Fruma will wear in book 2:

(Click on the image to see it bigger.)

(Description of image: Photo of a row of individually-wrapped string cheese snacks. On each snack, a short message is written in red marker. The messages are: “Is your name KRIS?,” “I bite back!,” “POISON,” “Price: $800,” “Not tasty,” “Eat at Your Own Risk,” “Grrrrrrrr…,” something that I can’t make out at all, and finally, “I know where you work.”)