The Cover Story – Part II
For a long time I scribbled in my sketchpad thumbnails of vials and swords and guitars and dragons and all kinds of imagery that I thought were symbolic of the story.
I tried the two-part green pendant of Lord Vidar, I tried the image of the vial, I tried drawing dragons and phoenixes into a border which surrounded the title (and it just looked cheesy!!), and I tried multiple iterations of the blue vial. And for the longest time I just could NOT settle on an image that was appropriate for what I was hoping to achieve.
It came to the point where I had the design of the sword pretty much set with the phoenix and the red stone and the white pommel but it looked too bare on the page by itself. I toyed with several layouts and threw the idea aside.
Then I settled into designing a sketch for Matthias’ ‘cuatro’ or Guitar. I think it was back in High School where I did this art class on some mixed medium printing and I had this design of the middle of guitar with some fruits around it – the middle part was cut out and replaced with the exact same design in another medium (yes, confusing) but that, and a CD cover I had seen with the perfect circle of the guitar gave me the idea to use that as a feature. I also decided that the circle (sorry to all the technical guitarists out there, I keep referring to the circle) could be decorated ornately to show elements of the actual story. Being a very expensive custom-built guitar in the story I went to town with putting gems and inlays into it.
The map was a last-minute idea when I was putting together the printing file for BookPal, I suddenly realised that I FORGOT THE MAP!!! At the time I was sketching the guitar design so rather than leave the guitar hollow in the middle, I decided to sneak in the map of the main areas of the story (muahahaha). Then I photocopied the design of the sword that I had, and of the guitar, and cut them out, and placed them side by side on a mock up cover to see how it would look. The phoenix on the spine of the book was meant to be the Standard or emblem of Itticca.
I hesitated for some time about including the guitar on the cover because it was not such a central element of the story – but in the end it was included – not only because it was visually fitting, but because it had some symbolic significance to the story. To me, it was the symbol of friendship and communion and solidarity – as well as belonging to the secondary-main in the story, Sir Matthias. Sir Endor’s dagger would have also been fitting here but visually much less appealing.
I scanned three different layouts to Xi (my very awesome graphic designer) and she came back with a recommendation.The cover design was born and my ‘evil’ plan of sneaking the map into the cover worked!! 
So that was the long and the short of the cover design 🙂 So say what you will about the cover design – but I had a lot of fun sketching and working with Xi through the process!! 🙂
lastflightoftheancients 