How I Did the Animorphs Covers - by David Mattingly

My Adventures as an Illustrator

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How I Did the Animorphs Covers<br>Photoshop and Elastic Reality

David Mattingly<br>Apr 27, 2026

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I did The Animorphs covers from scene descriptions that Scholastic sent, telling me what they wanted. For most of my other cover work, I would read the manuscript and have free rein deciding what to do. Scholastic wanted more control over these books, so I only read them after it was clear the series was a hit.

The scene description, or spec, told me which character would be morphing into which animal. They rotated through the 6 characters (Jake, Cassie, Rachael, Tobias, Marco and Ax.) They would also give me an idea of what they wanted for the cutback.The scene description would usually come in as a fax from Scholastic. Yes, I had a fax machine back then.

Animorphs #33 spec sheet<br>After I got the spec sheet, I would do some sketches in pencil to get my ideas down.

Idea sketches for # 34<br>I would then send the most promising ones to Scholastic for approval by fax.

Fax sketches for #6<br>They would choose one, and I would usually do a more finished version of the sketch for their approval.

Final sketch for Animorphs #6<br>After I got the final sketch approved, I would book photographer Addie Passen and the model to shoot reference for the cover. I worked with Addie for almost 20 years after I had a bad experience with Bob Osonitsch . Bob had a two tiered system for his clients, with his celebrity clients treated well, and everyone else in the second tier. I was in the second tier, so I shopped around for a new photographer, and found Addie. She always treated me well, and became a friend. She had a remarkable career before she started shooting reference for illustrators. Here is a great Wikipedia page on her: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelaide_Leavy<br>I found reference for the animals wherever I could. One of my best sources was a private zoo, Space Farms in Sussex County, New Jersey. I could get close to the animals, and photograph them in a variety of poses. Often times I would take a leg from one source, a head from another, and the body from another. Animals won’t pose, so I had to “Frankenstein” them to get the position I needed for the cover.

Bear reference for Animorphs #7<br>I spent a week to ten days on the finished cover, depending on how complicated the morph was. I did the final cover using Adobe Photoshop, and a program (now defunct) called Elastic Reality.

Final for Animorphs #6<br>Elastic Reality was an unstable program. Many times I had the frustrating experience of setting everything up for the morph, which would take several hours, only to have the program crash, losing all my work. I now do morphing in a program called Nuke , which is much more stable than Elastic Reality . Nuke does a lot of things besides morphing, but it does morphing superbly. I’ll explain about morphing in my next Substack post.<br>Each book had a flipbook of the character morphing into the animal, so I had to do a 5 step morph for each cover, then a 72 step morph for the flipbook. The flipbooks were all reproduced in black and white, but I found it easier to do them in color and then turn them black and white later, so I have color versions of the flipbooks for most of the covers.

Animorphs #6 Flipbook<br>I did The Animorphs digitally, so there is no original artwork. However, you can buy signed prints of any of my covers on Etsy here:<br>https://www.etsy.com/shop/AnimorphsArtStore?ref=seller-platform-mcnav<br>I have a very few Animorphs oriented items still up on eBay. This is everything I have left:<br>https://www.ebay.com/itm/336141742272<br>https://www.ebay.com/itm/236285661088<br>https://www.ebay.com/itm/335948712633<br>https://www.ebay.com/itm/236088763517

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Discussion about this post<br>CommentsRestacks

I, Fangirl<br>1d

These traumatized me as a child, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. Awesome work.

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Kate Tooke<br>1d

Wait, THE Animorphs cover illustrator has a Substack?! Seriously though, thank you for sharing your process!

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