The idiom “don’t judge a book by its cover” doesn’t hold up for a Somerville artist who hopes readers will critique each and every exterior.
“ I fully support judging a book by its cover,” said Monique Aimee. “ That’s literally my job, so I don’t feel bad about it.”
Aimee is the artist behind the cover illustrations for several fan favorite romance books, including “Scot and Bothered” by Alexandra Kiley and “The Summer of Broken Rules” by K. L. Walther.
The first romance novel she ever illustrated was “By the Book” by Amanda Sellet. Aimee has since designed around 40 covers for authors across the East Coast as well as England and Australia.
Aimee wanted to be an illustrator from a young age when she discovered that her private art teacher in elementary school was a professional illustrator.
“It was no question I was gonna go to art school, but I saw illustration as a major, and I knew I wanted to pursue that because it is a good middle ground between fine art and design,” she said.
She attended Lesley University’s College of Art and Design in Cambridge. She worked early jobs as a display artist at clothing store Anthropology, a junior designer at Loyal Supply Co. in Somerville — where she illustrated many of their greeting cards — and a sign artist at Whole Foods.
She later studied typography in Melbourne, Australia for three months.
“ That really changed my lettering very fast. I just learned a lot of techniques,” she said. “Every morning, we were doing copperplate calligraphy for an hour, learned brush lettering, learned sign painting. I even learned how to make fonts.”
Aimee doesn’t use pre-existing fonts on her cover illustrations. She actually draws each one, so it better incorporates her design and complements her “bright and bold” illustrations.
One of Aimee’s most coveted jobs was illustrating the cover of Casey McQuiston’s “One Last Stop.” The author is known for their political gay romance novel turned film “Red, White & Royal Blue.” (The film stars none other than Boston-born Uma Thurman as the President of the United States.)
In illustrating a romance cover, Aimee said it’s important to show the couple with some tension and a hint at the novel’s setting. She often provides three initial sketches to the art director and revises from there.
“A lot of times I don’t even get the manuscript,” she said. “Most of the time, the art director puts together a mood board for me. My favorite situation is where I’ll have a summary of the book, I’ll have the important characters and what they look like, the setting, and then — best-case scenario — I will also get images of the vibe of the book, of color palettes.”
Before officially being hired, the book’s art director sent Aimee’s portfolio to McQuiston and asked if she would be a good fit.
“ She’s got such a great talent for capturing a lot about a person in a few strokes of a portrait,” said McQuistion. “I think that her portraiture, like her illustrations of people, what struck me when I first saw them was how simple they were, and yet they were really expressive, and they really captured the energy of a person.”
McQuiston said they had ideas about the cover for “One Last Stop,” but “ in a classic way, my brain is much better at words than images.” Set in New York City, McQuiston’s sapphic tale follows August, who is new to the city, and Jane, a beautiful, free-spirited woman whom August always seems to catch on the Q train. August falls in love fast. But of course, there’s a time-travelling catch.
“ I had all of these ideas that August and Jane would be on a train that was going over the bridge over the city and somehow that doesn’t make an image, that does not make a cover,” McQuiston said.
Aimee remembered receiving a mood board for the novel and the main characters.
“We knew we wanted the characters to be on the train, but then the tension is like, ‘Okay, one character’s on the train, one is off, and they’re like looking at each other,’ that sort of thing,” said Aimee.
On the final cover, a woman with flowing red curls and a black shift dress walks by a Q train entrance and gazes in. Through the open doors, there’s another woman with short black hair wearing a leather jacket scattered with pins. Their eyes are locked, hinting at the beginnings of a love story.
“ It is such a perfect sort of cross-section of that visual of these two women and this train,” said McQuiston. “I did not have the ability to picture it the way that Monique did it. But then when I saw it, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. That’s exactly what I wish I could have said.’”
Along with her romance book cover design success, Aimee was also the first artist-in-residence for the Boston Celtics and VistaPrint for the 2024-2025 season.
“ Someone on the Celtics marketing team has been following me for a while, and I came to mind when they were looking for a Boston artist so I was very thankful for that,” she said. “I was very honored. To be honest, I’m not a big sports person, so I also was shocked for that reason, but that’s fine by me.”
She created six posters that were handed out for free at specific games, and she was able to attend some of her first Celtics games. Aimee had the chance to sit courtside during warmups, take photos on the court before a game and show off her work on the jumbotron. “ So now I’m just like used to VIP treatment,” she said.
In her free time, she creates projects for herself. She has designed fan posters for Chappell Roan and Noah Kahan, a fake coffee brand and redesigned book covers. An alternative cover of Louis Sachar’s “Holes” led to an art director hiring her for her first romance cover illustration project.
Her biggest piece of advice for emerging artists: “Fake projects lead to real projects all the time.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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