The Way To Babylon

This is the second cover I've done for the Different Kingdoms series by Paul Kearney, kind of time/space slip novels about people swapping between real and fantasy worlds. The layout is identical to the first book, which made it far easier to get on with as all the design work and style is set in stone, and I can just start making the art. However, I'm also still very pleased with how the cover for book one turned out, so it was slightly intimidating knowing I had to match the quality of that, which is a bit of a high point for me I think. Overall I reckon I did a good job - i don't think the main image is quite as atmospheric as before, but the colours and texturing are much better, and the two books sit together pretty well.

As before I started the cover in Indesign, laying out the text on a file that i'll eventually use to make the pdf files for print, so I can work around the words when I draw image in the centre and nothing overlaps awkwardly. I then copy/paste these basic shapes in Illustrator to draw the pictures, building up layers of increasingly dark detail to give it depth. This time round there's a strange symmetry between the 2 sides, which wasn't initially intentional - things like the wall in the foreground on both halves, and the broken cart vs the old wheelchair. Plus the general contrasting style of the 2 large buildings. I might carry this on to book 3 if possible, to add another level of detail into the art.

Next I paste these black and white vectors into photoshop and go to town with the textures to add some colour and life, also using the same indesign shapes from earlier as layer masks to show the edges of the circles and the split between the worlds, which gets lost a bit when doing the illustrator work. I also add in some leaves and rougher detail which is much easier in photoshop than illustrator. Next up: book 3!

The Different Kingdom books will be released sometime next year by Solaris. 

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!