So, sometimes I do something and I’m not
quite happy with it, but it takes me a while to work out what I don’t like.
Anyway, this is what happened with Anna and the Rock Dragons. I’ve spent the
last month pondering the cover, while I go through edits. It was missing
something.
I finally realised it didn’t look finished.
Well, I didn’t know what to do about that—oil pastels can be a bit tricky—so I
went back to my art folders to see what had attracted me to using them in the
first place. The work before had a lot more lines in them, more colour showing
through, more lines in parallel. I thought about that.
One of the biggest problems in the original
cover is the shirt—there’s too much blank space, and the speckling looks messy.
Other things I didn’t like were the outer lines—they look hesitant and almost
temporary, and the figures aren’t clear on the page. Also, the colours don’t
show through as clearly as they do in the raw, and that’s a shame, because
colour is what drew me to oil pastels in the first place.
So, I kept editing and tried to come up
with a solution, before I had to decide between delaying the release, or
releasing it in a cover I wasn’t entirely happy with. Here’s what I’ve done so
far:
- Played with the original art, redefined the lines, thickened them, and added more.
- Scanned, trimmed and darkened the scan.
- Played with the font on the title.
The cover after I played with it:
I still don't know if I like it... but, let’s see how it goes.
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