Title Design by Karina Granda at Little, Brown Publishing

The Magic Misfits is a wonderful story created by Neil Patrick Harris and published by Little, Brown.
Yes, you read that right, Neil Patrick Harris! I couldn't believe it myself either, but it is true!

Art directed by Mr Harris himself, this book proved to be one of the funnest, most challenging and certainly the biggest learning experience of my (young) career!

The Magic Misfits: book 1

Concept art and book cover

Regularly, before getting started with the interior illustrations of a book, a publisher would ask the artist to illustrate the book cover in order to use as marketing asset when announcing the upcoming title to the world.

Although this was certainly true for The Magic Misfits as well, the process to get from idea to book was unique from any other book I've ever done as art direction came from Mr. Harris himself.

Seeing as the process was so extensive, I've divided the process between interior illustration work and the book cover process.

From very early story ideas to character design exploration and final execution--let's look back a few years to the very early ideas of the Magic Misfits!

abracadabra

Interior art

The process for interior sketches was definitely quite challenging as the story was still
evolving while the art was being made. Because of this there were a lot of re-dos or style revisions but,
despite all of this, my experience with working with the team was incredible.

Style exploration

As the story progressed the style of the interiors and overall character design changed organically.
We explored a style based primarily of flat shapes and rendered details as well as fully
inked line-work art style before marrying both styles into one.

After the style was figured out, the rest of the interior illustrations went from
sketch to final pretty smoothly. Including a round of revisions between each step, of course!