Some readers know that I design and create my own covers. Some of those readers take almost as much enjoyment from the artwork as they do from the text. With that in mind, I thought it might be of interest to shed a little light onto the work that went into creating the cover artwork for The Book of Maker.
The Book of Maker is the most difficult book I have written to date, primarily because it originated as the seed of an idea presented to me by my daughter, Jodie. That seed came as a what-if question, namely, what if you could communicate with a character in a story and they could communicate with you. Therein, I had an intriguing idea gifted to me, albeit one with no beginning, middle or end. The idea lived in my mind for a long while, slowly growing, and while I jotted down ideas and kept notes they were very fragmented. For a number of years I shelved the story, or rather its fragments, and got on with writing other stories. One day, I pulled those fragments back from their dark resting places (or did those fragments pull me to them) and I began to wonder, what happens to the characters in unfinished stories? For it seemed that these characters had continued to develop in my subconscious. The story was somehow seemingly complete, as if it had found its own way; all I had to do was write it down. At least that’s what I thought when I began. It soon became clear that there were a lot of holes remaining, holes that would allow the story to collapse if I did not fill them. Fill them in I did, eventually, and finally completed a difficult to write novel.
Of course every book needs a cover, and it seemed that for this complex tale my mind could not avoid coming up with a complex cover. Below is a seriously abridged outline of how the cover was created, a labour of love that amounted to around eighty hours of work in photoshop.
The Book of Maker is the most difficult book I have written to date, primarily because it originated as the seed of an idea presented to me by my daughter, Jodie. That seed came as a what-if question, namely, what if you could communicate with a character in a story and they could communicate with you. Therein, I had an intriguing idea gifted to me, albeit one with no beginning, middle or end. The idea lived in my mind for a long while, slowly growing, and while I jotted down ideas and kept notes they were very fragmented. For a number of years I shelved the story, or rather its fragments, and got on with writing other stories. One day, I pulled those fragments back from their dark resting places (or did those fragments pull me to them) and I began to wonder, what happens to the characters in unfinished stories? For it seemed that these characters had continued to develop in my subconscious. The story was somehow seemingly complete, as if it had found its own way; all I had to do was write it down. At least that’s what I thought when I began. It soon became clear that there were a lot of holes remaining, holes that would allow the story to collapse if I did not fill them. Fill them in I did, eventually, and finally completed a difficult to write novel.
Of course every book needs a cover, and it seemed that for this complex tale my mind could not avoid coming up with a complex cover. Below is a seriously abridged outline of how the cover was created, a labour of love that amounted to around eighty hours of work in photoshop.
Often, before creating a cover I will make sketches, but I had a fair idea what I wanted with this one, so I just dived straight into creation.
I began by creating a background, which originated as the image of reflective water on the left. By applying various filters in photoshop and combing that with some airbrushing, I finally ended up with the image on the right. |
Every element on the cover represents some aspect of the story. The filigree pattern above was the starting point for the main structure of the marble. The entire pattern had to be outlined to create a working area, which was then combined with the marble texture. Once combined, highlights and shadows were airbrushed in to give an impression of depth. The same procedure was carried out individually for all the other marble elements, skeletons, lizard, etc., all of them drawn in outline, combined with the marble texture, with detail airbrushed in afterwards.
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After many hours creating the individual marble elements, combining them and adding shadows where they came into contact with each other, the text was added to the cover. Various positions and sizes were experimented with, before finally settling on the layout below. A monochrome version of the top right sculpture was also added to the back cover at this stage, as well as some covers of other books.
A particularly time-consuming element of the process was the addition of the ivy. This was done by first taking a small section of artwork, and then copying it many times and distorting it so that it appeared to be wrapped around the sculpture and text. Shadows were then airbrushed in to give the impression of it rising above the marble.
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Last but not least, magically enhancing the cover in just the same way as they enhance the text, a few butterflies were added.
And there you have it, add a bit of hair pulling, some sweat and tears, many cups of tea, some background music, and you have a somewhat basic idea of what went into creating this cover. I'm not going to go into the many month's work that went into producing the text around which it wraps; you can judge that for yourself.