Design Led Covers

Some more cover art I've been working on for Solaris, this time a bit more graphic than illustrative. The Regicide is the only one I actually did any real drawing for, but I mucked about with it in Photoshop so much you can hardly tell any more! This cover will probably get tweaked a bit before print as I had to do it quickly for a catalogue, and I'm hoping they'll shell out for a metallic spot colour on the text and maze but we'll see about that...

The other covers are for some books Solaris have the e-publishing rights for by James Lovegrove. They needed doing pretty quickly which is why we chose the style they're in, but its nice to do the whole lot at once and see them all tie together. The top 3 are mine and the bottom 2 where done by Luke the other Solaris designer. All 5 took us about an hour and a half but I think they've turned out well.

Recent Cover Work

I don't seem to have finished anything for ages, but last week the Solaris and Abaddon 2011 catalogue went to press which gave me the kick up the arse I needed to finish a load of covers I've had half finished weeks. Most of these still aren't done 100% finished but they're all getting there.

No Man's World: The Ironclad Prophecy

This is the second book in the No Man's World series by Pat Kelleher. I hadn't even started this til a few days ago so I had to steal a few bits old art to make it look complete. The red landscape at the bottom of the image is the same as book 1 which I'll have to update later but everything else is pretty much there. Despite the hastiness I'm really pleased with it at the moment!

Malory's Knights of Albion

These are covers for the first 2 books in the series. Like the Ironclad cover above I only had a day or two to put The Savage Knight together last week, and I'm very happy with it. This is the only cover here that's totally finished. Book 1, The Black Chalice was a bit more painful. It looks ok now, but I've been mucking around with it for weeks, and I think it's going to end up getting dropped and changed now anyway, mainly due to the strength of the book 2 art. This is fine by me as I spent so long shopping and changing the art I've no idea what to think of it anymore. Book 2 is miles better, so Book 1 needs to be just as good. I 've already started the replacement and its working much better already.

Solaris Rising

Last up is the cover for a new SF anthology from Solaris. Above is the rough mockup for the cover (I might change the text layout) and below that the whole image. I want to scene to wrap around the front onto the spine and back page in the end. This is another cover thats occasionally been a bit difficult. I've really enjoyed doing all the fancy glowing planets and space gas but what's held this cover up is a shuttle I wanted to the foreground. I must have designed and rejected 30 ships and still haven't done one I'm happy with. Now that the backgrounds pretty much done though I'm starting to think it might not even need it, or at least not as big as I first imagined.

The Infernal Game: Ghost Dance

This is the latest cover I've done for the Abaddon Books: Infernal Game series, and is the sequel to Cold Warriors. Not sure about the layout of the cover text yet, but I'm happy with the image. There's an unused alternative I was trying out below too - I wanted to make the 2 book covers match, and keep the main image inside the pentagram but I didn't think it worked very well. The 2 parts, are quite similar in shape and interfered with each other too much so I put the raven behind.