One of the things much wiser people than I keep trying to get through to authors these days is the importance of communicating with the artist they pick (or is chosen) to do their cover art.
I guess I’m kind of jumping on the bandwagon with adding my .02 cents, but circumstances conspired to give me the perfect opportunity to come up with a prime example for you all.
Here’s the pitch:
@FixWMATA is a local activist that tweets regularly about WMATA and it’s … issues.
A few days ago I had a brief Twitter conversation with @SueGrimshaw, and at one point she noted something along the lines of “we have the most fun” – we being editors and artists. This coming on the heels of a post on @JodyHedlund’s blog, “Book Covers: Are They Important in the Digital Age?” got me thinking about this aspect of my work.
I asked myself “Do I have fun doing cover art?”. The answer came back to me as a “Yes!” – although admittedly it took some thinking through to be certain. To answer the question from Jody’s blog, I believe that cover art is important, perhaps even moreso in the digital age than the old times of just physical books.
The first thing that came to mind when I looked at the IV packs for my recent medical treatment was “Alien eggs!”, and it became a running joke for a while, how each of them was “impregnating” me.
Oh come on now, if you’ve seen my art you already know some of my visions 
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I was taking a break from editing the manuscript for Chrysalis Emergent, and decided to create a concept rendering of one of the alien races that feature in the Legion Universe, this one also a Starwolf.
It’s not entirely how I visualize both this alien’s species, and the implants of Starwolves, in my head, but it gives you a good idea.
Alien Starwolf Concept Art
After a little bit of CSS hacking, and some new versions of a couple of the images used for the site, I’ve finally managed to create a single column page layout, and can now post more of the writing material up without it looking all squished.
To celebrate this minor piece of design tweaking, it’s maiden outing is a sneak peek at “Chrysalis Emergent“, a K’Arian Legion novel I’m re-working at the moment.
I hope you enjoy the site changes, and especially the fragment of Chrysalis Emergent!
With prompting from a few people, I’ve started working on re-tweaking a Legion Universe novel, with the intent of actually risking the dreaded rejection letters again.
But, me being me, I decided to do some cover art as well given the recent release of some new meshes.
Oddly, working on the character from this cover idea helped me to get a better understanding of some of the concepts the Legion Universe explores.
So, as I doubt will come as a surprise to anyone, I present to you a cover for Chrysalis Emergent, long before the words are even close to decent.
I’ve uploaded three of the renders I did based on parts of the vampire Promise novels I’m writing to the graphics site. I also added the short story snippets I wrote when I originally created the renders to the first and last ones.
They are, in order:
(Awakening is flagged NSFW due to minor female nudity)
Go take a look, and enjoy the teasers (the stories, not the nudity)
How many of you have seen the excellent movie “Equilibrium”?
Christian Bale, Sean Bean, Sean Pertwee … With talent like that, it’s easy to just get lost in the movie and ignore the plot.
Well, it is for me. But I digress.
Back to the plot of this entry – Do you remember how things were “Rated EC10 for emotional content”, banned, and burned, in the movie?
Now consider the idea of “age banding” in the UK.
The premise is simple – publishers want to start tagging the covers of children’s books with “age recommendations”.