It's my absolute honor to reveal the cover of Shawn Harris's October 6, 2026 picture book Duel! Scroll down to see the reveal, learn more about the book, and read an interview with Shawn about how the cover came together!
Two castles sit on a hill, home to two queens. But the queens would rather not share, and each sends a knight to joust for the land.
Two queens is one too many for this hill, the queens concurred.
Let's hold a duel. The one who wins will rule the hill in whole.
There’s just one problem—when the winner stands up in the middle of the field, no one is sure which side he came from. Maybe neighborly sharing is back in vogue! After all, they have so much in common.
The illustrations in Duel follow one simple rule. Each pair of facing pages is perfectly symmetrical, mirrored over the gutter of the book. Even the colors are the result of squish painting, wet paint pressed between center-folded paper.
About the cover:
LTPB: Using symmetry to tell a whole story is quite the feat! What inspired you to use this design element, and how did that inspiration turn into Duel?
SH: When I was in kindergarten, my teacher called the art project this book is based around “butterfly painting”. I’ve heard it called “smoosh painting”, too. It’s a mono-print made by folding wet paint between two sides of a page. The symmetrical result is almost always satisfying, and the process so memorable (I distinctly remember doing this in school), I’d been wanting to make such images into a narrative book for quite a while. I started, of course, writing about a butterfly, but as I experimented, I realized I could make all sorts of places and subjects, so long as there were two.
LTPB: It's never easy to capture a whole story in one image for the cover, so what was the biggest challenge for you in creating the cover of this book?
SH: There’s no gutter in the center of the cover like there is in every other illustration in the book, and the gutter in this book plays a really important role– it’s aligned with the fold in the center of my art. But it wasn’t right to have a non-symmetrical cover, so at first, I just had the fold of the paper right there down the middle of the cover between the paint, just like on my scanned art. Eventually enough people asked “what’s that line?” for me to edit it out of the image.
LTPB: What are you most excited for readers to experience when they get their hands on a finished copy of the book?
SH: I hope they’ll be inspired to make their own butterfly or duel smoosh painting.
LTPB: Other than the symmetry, are there any details on the cover that might give readers a clue about what’s to come?
SH: There will indeed be a duel, which involves fanfare far beyond two knights and two horses.
LTPB: What did you use to make the illustrations in this book?
SH: Tempera & acrylic paints.
LTPB: What risk did you take with this cover––and why was it worth it?
SH: The trim size is an unusually wide landscape. The drama of the duel is vastly heightened by seeing the paint spread a good distance over the pages, so I’m very grateful that my publisher was on board to print a less common dimension for me to tell this story right.
Duel publishes October 6, 2026 from Neal Porter Books! Pre-order your copy here!
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