I have been playing with thumbnails and lots of sketched to try and find the best moment of the book to put on the cover. I decided on the dual between a drake and a dragon and I wanted to add my main character in there as well, because this is not an epic fantasy as such, more a very personal journey of a boy trying to find out where he belongs in the world.
It took me quite a while in between work and other projects to put this cover together and it was redesigned plenty of times. In many ways I think working with a brief from a customer might be easier than working for yourself. I know the whole book by heart of course and there was so many different subjects to choose from and I kept getting new ideas.
This is the finished picture.
Now, I am quite happy with the render and the finished picture, but something was nagging me. One thing was the boys face although I couldn't yet put my finger on it. The other was, that this cover needs to function on a website and on small e-readers, both in colour and in Black and White. I was afraid it might just be too busy and not read very well in a small thumbnail size.
So I explored another idea where I kept the background totally simple and just had two silhouettes doing all the work. I quickly sketched the characters and thanks to Inkscape got them smoothly converted to vector shapes so that I could play around with the sizes.
This is what I ended up with:
While this cover doesn't tell much about the story, it does hint at it, and it reads much better in small. I was still loathe to throw away the other, so I asked for my sister's opinion.
She was in no doubt that I should go with the silhouette one, in fact she pinponted exactly what was wrong with the first. The boy has such a look of "tormented saint" about him, that it is hard to empathise with him. She is soo right!
So the silhouettes won. That cover took me two hours to make where the other took me best part of three days.
