Punked & Skunked

One of the more busy challenges from The Rotten School books was this cover for Book 11, "Punked & Skunked. The story was hilarious, and the visuals were a fun mess of contraptions from these kids' own inventive minds...of course, they really came from the twisted and genius mind of R. L. Stine himself. This cover needed Bernie Bridges with a contraption on his back that (in reality, this scene never really occurred in the book itself) was going quite hay-wired. I loved putting his dog, Gassy in wherever possible - and here he's getting his own auto-wash...and if you look at one of the shocks closely, you'll see that Bernie's own arch enemy in the series, Sherman Oaks, owns and makes these very shocks. Typical, he owns everything else.

The pencil had to be done quickly as this was one of the last books done in the series (before they were extended to another four more).

A first pass of color, although always ugly, just lays out the palette of colors with which to work. Knew this might be a bright yellow cover, so I needed highlights of that.

And the nice addition of the "construction/warning diagonal stripes" in black and yellow were a fun touch here and there.

I always loved how the art broke out from the boarders of the books' frame. This was no exception.