Penguin Brief: Emil and The Detectives: Colour schemes

COLOUR SCHEMES 

Once I'd drawn up all the basic characters and some of the objects in the book (statues, bank, money etc). I started thinking about colour. 
At first I just scanned in and drew over the characters keeping them in black and whites. I thought I could keep the cover itself white and potentially leave the characters to be coloured in by kids (or create it to look like it already had been) but after talking to a few others the general response was that it might look scruffy and unbuyable. From this I decided to go away, look at some kids book covers and look for a colour palette. 

When I googled prexisting covers for Emil, there was an absurd amount which were yellow and black or yellow and red or brown and yellow.  
They were nice but did feel outdated and very same-y. 
I played around with the idea of keeping yellow in there but making it more eye-catching. This lead to me experimenting with blocks and shapes, first just cut outs (grabbing a square and hacking it into shapes). From this I liked triangles the most as they just looked fun and were easiest to fit back together. I drew tiny mock ups and began to experiment with them. After a while, the yellow just wasn't working for me. I opted to play with a coral and blue theme instead. It looked good but it still felt too plain which lead me to look at textures, I decided to draw in lines on the tablet to make it more playful and less graphic.