Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is a book about a girl named Kya. She is left to live on her own in a North Carolina marsh with nothing but nature being her parent, teacher and only friend. After some traumatic experiences, she becomes a suspect in a local man’s murder. The original cover for the book by Na Kim is a beautiful representation of the book and I took some inspiration from it for one of the versions of my designs keeping a similar, orangy colour scheme. The original cover features a marsh landscape and Kya in her boat that she used for transportation. This is the exact picture you would imagine in your head when reading the book.
I started off the task by brainstorming ideas taking inspiration from the book. After some sketches and notes, I painted two versions of the book cover with different styles and aesthetics. I like to create a couple of versions for a project so that I can compare the two and pick the one that would do the job better. The initial sketches came to me very easily. I had vivid images of the book and story in my mind and I wanted to portray the ideas on the cover. The sketches came out very messy because I started testing different colour combinations and adding notes.
The first version of the cover features a blue crawdad on a grey background with bold, all-caps lettering. I took some inspiration from modern, minimalistic cover designs that use a lot of bold colours and high contrast.
The second version of the cover has a more vibrant, illustrated look. The illustration features some key items from the story and a landscape from Kya’s bay. Feathers, the shell necklace, Kya’s boat, and a bird are an important part of the book and I wanted to showcase them on the cover.
For the final cover, I decided to choose the second option. I think it brought out more personality of the book and could be visually interesting for the target audience.
Preliminary sketches
Two design options for the cover:
The final design of the book Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens:
