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:

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.