Thumbnails I drew while rereading The Magicians, by Lev Grossman. I was playing with the ideas of Quentin, the main character, using "magic" tricks before being accepted into the magician college where he would go on to do real magic. 

One of my first roughs for the book cover. The magicians are turned into geese at one point during the book and I liked the idea of illustrating their journey. 

This is one I might end up doing just for fun because I like the idea. For the actual book cover it was just too literal to draw the main characters as the face cards, but I think it would be fun to see Quentin as King and Martin Chatwin as the Joker. 

My final idea that I ended up landing on. I liked the idea of looking at a textbook that Quentin might be using. He describes magic as a difficult, particular skill that only very, very smart people can do. I wanted to illustrate the hand positioning and the specifics of a spell on the book cover. 

I was drawing a lot from old instructional illustrations. I like the rendering of the hands. They usually are wearing dress shirts with buttons that are included in the drawing, so I used that as well. 

Some inspiration for the spells that might be in the textbook. I looked at a lot of old greek, High Germanic and old English texts. 

One of the first drafts. 

Added notes that I imagined would be in a textbook, using a rushed cursive that I imagined Quentin might have. Rendering the hands a little more with white and red chalks. 

Finished product with text and barcode. 

The finished product.