Wind in the Willows 2nd edition Cover

I am thrilled to announced that after being out of print for many years, my illustrated edition of Wind in the Willows is be re-released by IDW October 7th 2025!

Back when I first illustrated the book about a decade ago, it was a bucket list project for me. Getting to return to the book and create a new cover for the new edition was a delight and offered me a chance to update the cover. Here you see the cover with title, spine treatment and back blurb, but below I'll go into the process of revisiting these riverbankers and wild wooders.

One of the troubles I had with the first edition cover (which will be included as a 2 page spread illustration in this edition) was a scene that included all four characters. I see this book as a true ensemble cast, but the number of times they are all together are very limited and mostly occur at the end of the book. So for this cover I went with circular portraits of them over a scenic view of the river with drapes of willow branches hanging down.

I'd already drawn versions of these portraits for bookplates that were never produced for the first release, I cobbled those together with branches in one of the existing interior illustration, redrew Rat and Mole messing-about-in-boats for the back cover...and drew a new version of Toad Hall...which I heavily based on this photo of the back of Mapledurham House, a location long used by other Willows adapters as reference and what I used my first go-around.

With the above layout assembled using old and new drawings with digitally blocked in color, I set about inking the new version. I know I could have kept the old portraits, but for the sake of the new piece being a complete work of art and to keep the line quality consistent through the whole piece, I inked the whole thing from scratch.

The original is roughly 24" x 16" and even at that large scale it was difficult to ink the details of Toad Hall as well as I wanted.

I scanned the art (in several passes since something that large won't fit on my scanner bed) and started the coloring process. The first step, called flatting' is about establishing all the color areas with flat colors (though there are a few quickly painted gradients I put down quickly to map out what my plan was. This step also includes doing color holds (areas where I want the inkwork to be a color other than black) and pretty much everything is a color hold here...the portraits are a dark brown the frames are a warmer brown the water, the clouds, the willows, and the distance all get some tone to soften this image so there are no harsh black lines.

The last step was to render the final colors. I mostly used the dodge and burn tools in Photoshop while using a stock textured brush––but I also used the paintbrush with another soft textured brush for some of the more subtle color transitions. Here you can see the full cover art with no trade dress.

Wind in the Willows will be in stores October 7th 2025 published by IDW

And you can pre-order it here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/796673/the-wind-in-the-willows-with-illustrations-by-david-petersen-by-kenneth-grahame-david-petersen/