The Awesome Cover Art

Not often you get to write that as a header without feeling like a total tosspot... Anyway, this is the cover for The Awesome by Eva Darrows, a YA novel from Ravenstone about a kick arse teenage vampire hunter from a family of kick arse vampire hunters, who all of a sudden has to try and fit in with normal society, find a boyfriend and lose her virginity before she starts sending the vamps crazy (which is what happens apparently). The brief was pretty open so I tried to do something that was the exact opposite of the tedious 'hunks/babes in a blue graveyard' Buffy/Twilight inspired stuff you get on Urban Fantasy books a lot of the time. Plus, if I could get away with using evil looking dayglo green skulls and neon pink text I'd be well happy.

rough mockups

full cover design

Above are my first sketches. The diagonal split on the second (used) rough was a complete accident. Whilst fiddling with the photoshop layers from my first attempt it just happened that one of the textures I'd used split the page in half - It looked pretty cool, so I worked around it. Normally I do more mockups than this, but was so taken with it I sent them straight to Editorial/Hillary.
After the initial suprise of getting a luminous green punk vomit cover (having expected something quite different) it seemed to go down pretty well - the only addition requested being the crossed stakes pattern over the bottom half to ramp up the vampire/love element, which I think was a good call.

The skull was drawn straight into Photoshop (we have a cool plastic skull model in the Rebellion office that I used as reference) with the white, black and grey on separate layers. Once I was happy with the form I pasted it over the rough (which I did a full size) and started to muck with the colours. I've been keen to try this for a while (previously when drawing in this style I kept the lines black), as one of the problems I found with high contrast black and white art is that it's really tough to get any text on top to stand out. Beyond that it was pretty simple; The title text needed some work to make it more readable, and I drew the heart patterns in illustrator to make them more uniform, but all the colours and stuff were sampled straight from the rough layout. 

 

The book wont be out til next year, but I put together an advance review copy earlier this week - these are some designs for the internal spreads.

Fear of the Dark

Nyctophobia is fear of the dark, which is a hard concept to get across on a book cover, especially without resorting to monsters and ghosts and stuff (which I did to start with!), so I did a LOT of roughs and not-so-roughs for this cover - none of which were used in the end, as the final covers had nothing in common with them really! The idea for the UK cover (above) came out of a day dream I had at my desk after banging my head against a wall for half an hour having run out of ideas. It's based on some photos I took of a lightbulb was almost finished as soon as I'd mocked it up. The US version (below) was kind of an accident - I was mucking around with some textures for something else and they looked kind of noirish and spooky, so I added a house and a moon and it was pretty much done.

I still really like some of the rough ideas I had to start with, so I might try and reuse parts of them in something else in the future. They were deemed (correctly!) to be too graphic-novely for the tone of the book, or just a bit too supernatural/action based. I got quite far in the rendering of a few of my favourite ones too, so its a shame to just forget about them. Anyway here's the very first lot I did. Originally in the story the house were the action takes place revolved to face the sun, so one side was light all the time, and the other dark. That idea got dropped though, so immediately some of these weren't quite right. An unfortunate side effect of doing covers for books that aren't yet finished.

The below was the cover version I liked best, but I couldn't make it work quite right - the figure was too small, or squashed up, and the shadows cast by the lamp that form the letters didn't work in the way I wanted them to. This led into the version at the bottom, which used the same idea, but makes it a bit less flat. This was definitely too much like a comic though, although I like it in its own right. I might finish it off at some point just for the sake of it.

The final book goes to print this week. On the opening spreads of the internals I gave over a few pages for the lightbulb slowly tuning on, page by page - almost like a flick-book, which seemed like a cool thing to have instead of a bog-standard title page. It gave me the idea of actually trying to animate it properly though, and this is the result (be kind, it my first ever attempt at this kind of thing!).

Nyctophobia is on sale 9th October 2014.

The Raven's Banquet

More cover art, using the same style as the Lupus Rex cover I did a few weeks ago for reason other than I thought it looked cool and wanted to try it again! The sky is a darker colour than I wanted originally cos I screwed up and couldnt get the coverlines to standout properly (again)!
Final cover design, black and white linework and roughs below. The Green man face is a little pic for the chapter break pages on the internals, which was shamelessly ripped off from some photo ref supplied to me by the author, so I can't claim much credit for that. Pleased with the Raven though!

EDIT: just found out this book is getting a super-limited paperback release (it was ebook only up until this morning!), which is awesome! I've had to put together a full cover design today -  Here it is:

King of the Wolves!

This cover is for a second edition printing of Lupus Rex by John Carter Cash, published by Ravenstone. The first edition hardback had a cover by Douglas Smith (which was lovely - I did the design work for it, and was really proud of how it turned out). When we came to do a paperback reprint for the UK I got the chance to do something myself. The US paperback got a new cover too - by Edouard Groult one of Rebellion's concept artists - but both that and Douglas's original were quite similar in tone if not style, so I went in as different a direction as I could think of.

I did the main illustration quite quickly, all freehand in photoshop, but using the lasso tool to both add and remove texture from the wolfs fur. It worked quite well so I'm hoping to use he technique again in the future. The cover text was slightly more problematic. Because the picture was high contrast and in simple colours, it was very difficult to make the text stand out in any colour other than white, which annoyed me slightly as I'd tried very hard to not use white anywhere in the image - and its doesn't appear anywhere else on the front or back cover design. This is something that's likely to bother me more than anyone else though, so after several hours of mucking around I left it as it is above.

Below are the roughs I came up with to start with (I knew early on I wanted to do something almost designey - using silhouettes, just had to decide what, and how), and the full cover layout.

Putting the flying quail in the spine logo was one of the last things I did - and possibly my favourite thing on the cover now, if I'd have thought of it earlier, it could have gone in a totally different direction.

Dead Stop

First cover of the year finished. Hopefully the first of many!

The logo part was done in Illustrator, i then skewed it and faked the 3d effect, then dropped it onto the background in photoshop and added some lighting and stuff. This is available as an ebook from Abaddon Books.

Blood Kin

Another bit of cover art finished. Doing loads at the moment to get ahead for my impending Paternity Leave. This is for Blood Kin by Steve Tem. He was really keen for it to be a proper bit of overgrown, rotting, slightly psychedelic southern gothic. Below is the cover art without cropping/text design, which for once I didn't try and incorporate from the start.

As this cover has quite a lot of similar elements to Different Kingdom (trees/old houses/leaves) I was keen to make it as different as possible stylistically, so I inked most of the silhouettes by hand then put them all together afterwards in photoshop. For the Kudzu leaves in the foreground I made a some custom brushes in photoshop and built up layers of ever brighter/bigger leaves. Really helped to add some depth to what was quite a flat silhouetted picture. The skull in the bottom right was a last minute addition too. I loved doing this - the whole process/technique I used is something I'm keen to try again!

Scans of the ink drawings and my first mockup from a few months ago.

A Different Kingdom

A Different Kingdom is the first book in a series of three by Paul Kearney, originally published by Gollancz in the early 90s. They're all stand alone stories, but are linked thematically rather than by any particular plot, and generally involve people slipping between normal and fantasy worlds and vice-versa. Anyway Solaris are re-issuing them soon, and this is the cover I did them.

All the cover elements were created in Adobe Illustrator, before being pasted, one layer at a time, into Photoshop for colour and texturing. The text and general layout was all done in InDesign, all of which had to be pasted into photoshop too, to use as layer masks when hiding/fading parts of the artwork.

The hardest part for me here was deciding how to create the contrast between both the real and fantasy halves of the picture and the main book background without ending up with some part of the image in negative. My first idea was literally just a spot with two silhouettes in, which I'm glad I managed to ditch, although it took me a while to work out how... 

I like the final thing so much I'm selling a square, untextenated (its a word!) version of the cover art as print from my webshop. If you'd like to buy one click here!

Space! Gas! Planets! or: Solaris Rising volume 2

My first bit of art for 2013! Cover for the second Solaris Rising anthology edited by Ian Whates. These covers can be quite text-heavy so I laid the words and planets out together in Indesign/Illustrator before starting in Photoshop to make sure I left enough room for everything, a technique I first tried last year on the Solaris Rising 1.5 ebook. Works quite well this way, as the text really sits in and around the art. Here's the final cover, fully extextinated (yeah, it's a word):

The volume 1.5 ebook cover. Really happy with the fuzzyness of this:

I keep thinking one day I'm gonna stick a spaceship on one of these covers. Here's a couple of roughs I tried, one slightly more in earnest than the other...

I started both images as vectors/fonts in Illustrator and Indesign to get the layouts right, before pasting all the basic shapes as separate layers into Photoshop for colour and texturing. Here's roughly the how the files started off: