This article was written by the awesome Claire Peacey, a professional artists who specialises in book covers and RPG Art: check out her website at https://cpeacey.wixsite.com/autumnsky. I highly recommend her if you need a cover for your book; I certainly intend to work with her again!
There’s a certain lack of truth to the phrase ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ – whilst this may be a wonderful metaphor for looking to the core of a person, it’s rubbish for actual books. The cover is the first and foremost thing we do choose them on.
Covers are also oddly specific beasts – somewhere between branding and art, they are ultimately designed to be enticing and informative. So being approached by an author is always a nerve-racking time for both of us – as a cover artist I want to get to understand the best way to sell the authors world, and the author has to let a complete stranger clothe their baby, often via the medium of stick figures.
Speaking of stick figures, we love them. Genuinely – artists are visual thinkers and whilst it’s our jobs to take a few words and paint a world from them, it’s also nice if an author can give a bit of reference material – it just tends to short-cut the initial draft process. But it’s also important to remember that nobody sees exactly the same thing and many of our design decisions are based on quickly communicating a genre and feel to someone flipping past – it’s our job to respect the authors description but also to deliver a workable cover. Statistically we have .02 of a second to persuade someone to stop. That’s not a lot of time to get a lot of information to them.
In the case of Vile, I had a wonderfully detailed description of both the main character, the primary setting and the overall feel of the novel, which made my life much easier from the outset. In addition, Keith was very forthcoming in additional information, so I set to and created an initial look for the primary character, as she was going to be the main focus of the cover. Luckily he loved it, so I put the kettle on, hooked up to the headphones, put on a lot of sweepingly epic YouTube background music mixes and set to work.
I tend to use a 3d render programme, along with digital painting in Photoshop, and a bit of additional 3d modelling for anything specific such as clothing or scenery I haven’t already got rattling round my model library. It’s a process that’s very easy to get absorbed in and I usually end up producing a couple of draft renders for myself, just to get perspectives and focal points in place. This too can often result in a bit of a departure from the initial descriptions as sometimes they simply can’t all fit into one cohesive image that ‘reads’ well. One of the single most valuable bits of advice I ever had was, if you’re not sure if a cover is working, flip it to black & white, and shrink it to 3” at really low resolution. If it vanishes into a mush, start again. If you can still get a sense of the kind of genre it is, it’s doing ok. Less really is more, especially when you also have to balance out space for typography.
Some days I do a lot of starting again. But you never don’t learn something from it, even if that is ‘I need more tea and to come back to this with fresh eyes.’ The first draft I did for myself for the cover was, quite frankly, terrible but it told me the concept of the character scrambling into the castle was either going to be a lot of her bum or a lot of not much else and a side profile just lacked any sense of depth or urgency.
So I ripped it out, drank more tea and started again. Luckily this time it came together in an image that Keith also felt worked for his world, and after repainting a few bits (more dirt! More blood! A set of nostrils that don’t look like a major 90’s coke habit – my bad with oversharpening there!) – and swapping out her sword from a rapier to a broken longsword, the cover was born.
We decided to keep the typography quite classic in its font, with it being a single word title, and giving it some rugged texture. Using the sword as an additional lead-in line worked in its favour. To be honest, there have been times when the typography has taken me as long to get right as the image. Given how important it is in conveying tone and genre, that’s ok by me. The visual hierarchy of cover design always begins with font and overall shape, then colour, then finally details… for a fantasy novel, for example, the shape of a tiny gem on a pommel is far less important to a reader who can’t possibly know it’s significance – yet – than typography and a silhouette that screams ‘Mysterious Portentous Stranger’. Possibly dragons. Definitely epic.
I genuinely loved working on Vile as what’s not to love about burning castle, high alpine mountains and a badass protagonist with a sword in a uniform that references historical outfits. Everyone has different influences, but I’d honestly say if someone was thinking of doing any sort of cover art, the best way to learn is to look – at everything. At photos of landscapes, at why different animal and plant adaptations enable them to survive In an environment, at clothing from all eras of history and all around the globe, at how different cultures celebrate and mourn, at original legends and fireside tales, at books in bookshops, at their spines, how they fit on the shelves, what is the digital charts, at movie posters and cave paintings. The wider the net you can draw from, the richer and more informed the images become. After all, the best fantasy is the one we can effortlessly believe in.
And keep doing it.
A huge thank you to Claire for writing this article and for the amazing work she does – once again, if you are at all interested in top quality cover and RPG Art check out https://cpeacey.wixsite.com/autumnsky. She is excellent fun to work with!
Oh, and you can buy the book on amazon [here]
