Dear Blog Friends,
I worked through the formatting of SEEING THINGS, and I’m waiting for my beta reader to give me feedback on the sequel, TREEMAKER, so I’ve been devoting my time to creating the cover art.
I wanted each cover to have several different elements. For the first part, I made a large acrylic collage, printing with gesso, using washes, and generally having fun playing with paint. That’s taken about a week, because I have to wait for each coat to dry. For SEEING THINGS, I also wanted to have a second layer of texture. Since I’m experimenting, I’m using two different sheets, one of which is going to have neutral/light texture of gesso and acrylic with brush marks. If that isn’t interesting enough, I’m going to use sandpaper and India ink to get an etching look. I’ll put the pieces up on my artblog, because that’s where I generally talk about art.
This week we did a photo shoot with a very pretty friend who volunteered to model for us. She’s quite modest, so I’m going to have to crop it so that it’s not obviously her. One of the exciting things I found when I went to the bookstore (on a research mission!) last weekend was that both the Sookie Stackhouse series and Laurel Hamilton’s Anita Blake series have new paperback covers that veer away from the hot-chick-with-tramp-stamp format that urban fantasy has been wedded to. I still have a hot chick, but now I feel I can make it considerably more tasteful and still not scare off urban fantasy readers. I hope. Either way, it should be very pretty and very interesting.
I have two more drawing/paintings to do, and then we can photograph my paintings and upload them. My husband did some of the photos of our model with his film camera, so we have to get those developed and look at those images too. Sometimes you can get clearer, crisper, more interesting images with film than digitally, especially with a cheap camera like my digital camera.
This is going to be the first time I’ve created art digitally, and it’s going to be much more complex than the short story book covers, so I’m excited about it.
Kater
