This guest article is from Claire Peacey, who made the covers for Vile and the recently released Dead Moon, both available on Amazon. Claire is a fantastic professional artist working in book covers and RPG Art – not only does she produce wonderful work but she is a pleasure to work with. In this article, she talks about her process for designing the cover of Dead Moon, with examples of drawings during the process to the final product. After taking a look, check out her website at https://cpeacey.wixsite.com/autumnsky.
Having had a load of fun with producing the cover for ‘Vile’ it was fantastic to hear back from Keith about some new work – in a totally different direction. As before, the provision of a detailed description and some thumbnail sketches really helped with being able to establish a few different ideas for the work and get a feel for the sort of world Keith had created.
The original concept was suffering a little from the ‘all the things, all at once’ but that’s not always a bad thing for a first idea. It gives a starting point and a lot of options to work from. I’ve got to admit, even though it’s my job to be able to extract visuals from words, menacing space mandalas took a few head scratches to work out exactly how that was going to pan out!
The first step for me is to spend a little while with a cuppa, sketching very loose layout concepts – they are literally just a few lines to get a balance of shape and form which integrate key elements. And definitely not anything you can show a client if you want to maintain their confidence, particularly when you get the book name wrong on them, as you can see below.
Exhibit A for the defence; even my cat doesn’t usually get to see this stage.
I rejected several of these more or less immediately as they basically were starting to look like a romance novel/buddy movie, or the protagonist was playing peek-a-boo with the offending alien ship – sometimes the most important thing you get from an exercise is ‘don’t do that’.
Normally I’d create the backdrop for a world myself, usually through a combination of 3d modelling and digital painting, but with this being set in a specific city I began by searching for a suitable stock photo. Although it would end up – via a lot image manipulation and digital painting in Photoshop – being dark, on fire, indistinct and essentially mangled, I wanted that authenticity in there and having a stock photograph as both base and reference was invaluable.
To get the unique shape of the spaceship took a few rounds of 3d sculpting using basic mandala shapes as a guide to give it the right feel. A quick render pass of this model to give light and form details then got taken into Photoshop to be integrated into the picture as a whole.
I use a lot of layers, masks and blending modes to build up interesting textures. Sometimes the most effective way to show unimaginable horror descending from the sky is to give just enough information to show something is going on but leave enough space for the mind to fill in the blanks. Humans read shapes before details and not over-detailing a scene that would, by its very nature, be confusing and hard to comprehend if you were actually there adds an inherent sense of menace – our brains have enough information to grasp something terrible is happening, but not quite enough to be able to rationalise it. Of course, for the purpose of a cover, you still have to be able to go ‘yup that’s a spaceship’….
This gave me enough elements to develop some concept pictures to send on to Keith – one from the original description and two which conveyed an appropriate genre feel. If a concept is strong initially, I’ll usually just send the one picture to work from, but in this case, it needed more exploration. I’d also drunk enough tea to get the title right by now.
This is the point where I just have to put the kettle on, wait for the author to have a look through and, often, get a couple of different opinions. It’s not a good idea to design by committee but it’s always nice to know when they have consulted with people they trust/focus groups so they are totally comfortable with their choice going forward.
In this case, cover 3 came back as ‘that’s the one!’ but with the tweaks of lifting the ship up as it was parts of it dropping onto the city, not the beastie as a whole.
One of the things I do for a client is render up a ‘mock-up’ of how the cover will look on an actual book and screen. It’s not only a good marketing tool and a nice way to translate a flat design into the look and feel of a real book, but I also use it as my final checkpoint to make sure everything ‘reads’ well – no matter how many times you create a cover, you always need to double check your work and there’s something about flipping it into a different form that tells you something really does need moving a little to the left or yes, that bright spot on the edge really does draw the eye in the wrong direction.
After that, it’s just a matter of creating any additional format images that a client wants/has agreed in the initial contract (Insta or business cards/banners, for example)) and sending it all off to them. It’s always a fantastic feeling to know someone has found the cover they feel tells and sells their story and that they are happy with the work – at the end of the day, a cover has a job to do, but it also needs to be something an author loves. They’ve put their heart and soul into their work and I very much think that should be honoured by their cover artist.
Dead Moon was a brilliant challenge and it was really enjoyable to work with Keith again.
Thank you Claire for that insight! Vile and the recently released Dead Moon are both available on Amazon and looking beautiful thanks to her hard work. To check out more of her heart of if you’re looking for a highly recommended cover artist for your book: https://cpeacey.wixsite.com/autumnsky.
