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:

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!

Cover Design - Update

PLASTIC

by Christopher Fowler

Up until 3 days after the print deadline this cover didn't exist. I'd mocked up loads and loads of cover designs for this book over a period of weeks, and none of them were ever quite right, before finally settling on a photofit style thing (below). 
Anyway, whilst hurriedly designing the books' interior (having already blown the deadline) it suddenly dawned on me that a simple black and white scalpel/text layout I'd put together for the title page looked far more striking than the proper cover image, so I completely redesigned the whole thing that afternoon!

Some of the many roughs, sketches and mockups I did:

In the end I reused a few of these discarded ideas on the full cover design.

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: