Cover Sketches for My Grandma the Stranger (Kokila 2027)

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Hello dear friends!

My next author-illustrated book is titled My Grandma the Stranger!!! It's publishing March 9, 2027, and I had the enormous pleasure of making it with my same dream of a team at Kokila. Funnily enough, every book I've worked on so far have come out in early March (Our Lake, Kokila & Navigating Night, Anne Schwartz)—my Pisces babies all swimming out in the world. And while the last two books have been melancholic and a little watery, this one is a bit of a departure, at least as far as the latter is concerned. I don't think believe there's any water at all in this story...! O, what living in a desert does to a person.

This picture book follows a girl named Ying and her Grandma. It’s been years since they’ve last seen each other, but while Grandma has tons of fond memories with Ying, Ying doesn’t remember this lady at all. To her, Grandma is just a stranger she's forced to love and stuck with for a whole darn week.

This is based on my relationship with my paternal grandmother!! She raised me for the first couple years of my life, but for the rest of it, we've been apart.

I know they say write what you know, but I've always found that trying to spin fiction from a real experience is tricky. Different from writing an essay that revisits the past, and different from building a new tale entirely. It's hard to separate the memory from what makes a strong, tight narrative.

I ended up making significant changes to the narrative such that the final book feels only loosely based on my own life!! The personal edge to this story made editing it feel unbelievably difficult since I lacked distance from the emotions to tell whether a plot point was actually good or if I was just too attached to my lived experience. I struggled to write from memory with the cutting eye of a disinterested reader, and I owe so much to my editor, Namrata Tripathi, who made up for my lack.

Visually, I wanted to take this book into a slightly different stylistic direction from my last two. I am obsessed with the softness of Laura Carlin and Mary Herbert's work, and I thought it would be nice to bring in both haziness and a linear quality into the stylistic language of this book.

I have a bit of a theory that artists are primarily shape people or line people. You can be fluent in both, but I still think that everyone has a bit of a preference, one which comes more naturally than the other. I'm a shape person. Painting comes more naturally to me than contour drawings, and I feel like you can tell. It's easier for me to carve out shapes (light/shadow) instead of drawing objects. So this was a ginger step outside of my comfort zone.

It's always fun to share the first spread because it's really not a spoiler at all. Anyway, I promised some cover sketches!

First round of Thumbnails

The first round is just sending everything I have to my team and hoping they can pan some gold shavings from the stream.

With these, I was really leaning into the "Stranger" part of "My Grandma the Stranger," trying to play with Ying's petulance and emotional distance. And perhaps I leaned a bit too far into that, because Nami and my AD Jasmin Rubero came back to me with a very gentle note: Grandma looks like a stalker.

Particularly in the bottom two rows, where Grandma is literally following Ying as she scooters away in one thumb, and in another where the two look like they're on the cover of a crime novel. I sincerely didn't see it before, though it's so obvious now! The faceless figure of Grandma casting an ominous shadow on Ying is terrifying, mortifying, hilarious.

Nami and Jasmin did think the first two images had promise. (Though they suggested trying a version where Grandma isn't staring blankly at the window—in my defense, at this point, the staring-through-the-window had narrative significance to the book.) So how to make Grandma more fun and less scary?

Second round of thumbnails

I was feeling quite lost at this point. I started at the obvious beginning—Grandma arriving / with her suitcase—but then I ended up getting lost in trying to make things look good. The cover with the birds I just thought would look cool, lol. My husband Jonny pointed out that some of these looked like they might exist on a romance book cover—the second image was kind of Romeo and Juliet, and the bird cover felt very star-crossed lovers. Now I had to avoid both stalker and romance allegations.

I did return to the puzzle motif because I liked the visual metaphor of Grandma and Ying putting together the past / present / future together. But it's not a very compelling image, and you totally lose the "stranger" element.

The last image I kept Ying in the foreground and tried to make Grandma more fun and relatable and warm! She's holding a toy monkey! She's not a stalker! Alas her playing with a stuffed animal wasn't enough to make that cover work, so back to Procreate !!!

Third round of thumbnails

In my next round of sketches, I went down a whole rabbit hole of having Ying and Grandma interact around a tree. In the story, there was a plot point with a tree. I say was because things changed. But at the time, my team was convinced! Yay!

So my team picked this and I was set to go. At this point, I was nearly done with all my finals for the interior of the book! I always like doing the cover last, because I feel like I have the best grasp on the characters and the painting style. But oh my god I never even made it to painting this cover because a month before my final art was due (with the whole book nearly done), I started over entirely.

I think that's somewhat dramatic. I did rewrite the story and re-pace the whole book, and I did make a whole new dummy with entirely different sketches on every page, and I did redo every painting and toss out all the finals I made, BUT the bones of the story were pretty much the same. The big emotional beats remained.

Nami and I sat down on a three hour video call and went through my new dummy spread by spread, talking through every word. I was terrified she'd be disappointed or upset, but she was so incredibly supportive and eager to get this story straightened out. Three hours!!! Nami is so busy and she made me feel like the most important person in her life for those three hours. I only had a month left to make the final art, and she sped me through the copy-editing so I could get going!! But the beautiful thing is, when the story is working, the final art is sooooo much easier to make.

It did mean that I had to toss out the cover that we went with because I had entirely cut out the tree scene in the story! So it was right back to the start. I tried some more unexpected covers at this point (since I had exhausted so many ideas at this point).

Fourth round of thumbnails

This had to be my final round of thumbs just because we didn't have a lot of time. I tried a motley of different things, even flirting with this weird cover of Grandma putting up laundry (nevermind the fact that there was no scene of this in the book. That makes me wonder how far picture book covers can stray from the literal happenings of their interiors...perhaps a case study is in order)—but quickly, Nami and Jasmin narrowed down our options to these:

The first one might look familiar! It's a flipped version of the Ying that I drew in the first round of sketches, only now she's drawing—good! active!—and Grandma is reading—nonthreatening! Chill! I liked this idea of cropping Grandma's face in both cover, since she's a stranger to Ying and a stranger to us.

My team picked the cover of Grandma reading in the foreground—there was something appealing about Ying peeking around the corner (reminiscent of the tree thumbnails?), and though conceptually it worked, I went to final on this and I could not make a compelling image for the life of me.

So while I was struggling through that painting, I ended up painting the other sketch as well, just to see if it would work. And it went sooo much better. I ended up presenting the two final paintings to my team, and they agreed with me! Cover one it is!

Because I wasn't sure how much bleed I would get on the jacket, I tend to just add a TON of bleed. There's a lot more of the table and the paper that got cut off, and I even drew in Grandma's face, as you can see here. Jasmin, designer-extraordinaire, thought it would look better moving the title up into the window. And I'm so glad she did.

I have no in-process shots of making the cover because I was in a frenzy racing to meet the deadline. I did make it, god knows how.

And here's the final cover!

Pre-order now!

Thank you so much for reading, and please do consider pre-ordering! If you're a book person, you know that preorders help the lifespan of a book and signal to everyone who brings a book into the world that it's a title people might actually want to read. And if you're not a book person, you know now!!! (If you ever know you want to buy a book, go ahead and snag it before it even comes out. Helps the author, publisher, bookseller, your future self!)

I'm also very excited about the case cover (secret cover under the dust jacket for non-book people)—but that reveal will have to come later. There was quite a back-and-forth on that one too, an idea I wasn't willing to part with, and the simple solution which has echoes of some cover thumbs here.

Thank you so much for reading and for letting me infiltrate your inbox!This newsletter is a part of my slow migration away from Instagram and other social media platforms—I'm using Kit for my newsletter because I balk a bit at the social media feel of Substack. Feel free to forward it to anyone who might be interested. I'm still trying to figure out whether I want to archive these newsletters publicly or let them exist as ephemera, fading into the clutter of a modern-day email inbox. This may go up someday on a whim, but future ones may not... We'll have to see!

Warmly,
Angie