Grunt The Beserker - behind the scenes...

 I was just searching through some old files & found some of my preliminary sketches for Two Terrible Vikings & Grunt The Beserker my second collaboration with the brilliant Francesca Simon which I thought some of you might be interested in seeing the process around creating the cover

This was my very first version which I cleaned up a bit...

...to this which went over to the people at Faber - we all thought it looked a bit too scary so I gave it another go & rejigged the format to make it a bit clearer

I decided it would be less cluttered if Hack & Wack were separate from the terrible Grunt Ironskull so I doodled this in the back of my sketchbook...

...which turned into this...

It was thought that this version was too similar in colour to the first book so I decided to create a more brooding sky which I think works much better on the final book cover (see above)

For the back cover we'd decided to show Hack & Wack's pet wolf Bitey Bitey being menaced by Grunt's hound Muddy Butt - I drew a couple of versions - I rather liked the front on version but the final version works better with the text

Here's the final version...