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Andrea L Farley: Clamour and Mischief's Illustrator Spotlight

Andrea L Farley Clamour and Mischief authors Cover artist

A sepia-toned drawing of cover illustrator Andrea L Farley, the artist looks at the camera, her head tilted, the expression serious on her white face. She has dark-fringe on her forehead and wears a gray shirt.

Andrea L Farley is an life-long artist who recently took up creating book covers – including the cover for Clamour and Mischief. Here Andrea shares some thoughts on covers and corvids!

An unexpected tidbit:

I had always been vaguely aware of the fact that there are a lot of birds in the family Corvidae, but I was so surprised to learn just how many that actually is! I had thought to include all of them, but ended up selecting just a few simply because there was no way to include them all.

My favorite thing about making the cover:

As much as I love to paint portraits, it was fun to get to paint animals for a change. These are still portraits, I did my best to find references that I felt captured the personality of each type of bird, but they're also so simplified that I could focus on the form and movement more. I also really enjoyed putting in a tiny nod to the title in the choice of the birds on the spine, and I made sure to paint a pair of magpies, in honor of the old rhyme, so that they'd represent joy/mirth.

My favorite corvid:

I'm terrible at answering these kinds of questions, because I can rarely choose just one, but it's probably something of a tie between ravens and the Stellar's Jay. Ravens feature so prominently in the Pacific NW's indigenous people's lore and beliefs, they're so intelligent, and the woods here are full of their soft, deep calls in the winter.

Stellar's Jays are a large jay, with a prominent black crest and beautifully deep sapphire plumage on the rest of their body; I love how they flit about, with a swift, cheeky, clever confidence, and it always makes me laugh when they scold my cat. He might be hard for me to see (he's a black kitty, so he hides in the shadows of the shrubs most effectively), but the birds love to tattle on him.

Read all the Q&As with our Clamour and Mischief contributors.

Andrea's current projects include more illustrating, as well as more book covers. Over the long term, Andrea (also known as Altocello Art) intends on expanding her portrait work, as well as finding the best way to sell fanwork prints.


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