Psion Beta

My Husband has a friend who is an aspiring author, and he is fabulous. He decided to self-publish his first novel last year and asked me if I would be interested in doing the cover art. What a neat opportunity, I thought, so I accepted.

I've done commissioned pieces before, but this was the first book cover. When I originally thought of cover ideas, they all had scenes from the book or action poses of the lead character, but my first instruction was: NO humans. Humans are kind of my forte, so this posed a new challenge for me. I decided to do the cover graphically rather than in paint or other raw media.

I worked really closely with the author to get a look that he liked. It was kind of refreshing working for a "client" whom I had to please with my work! My current job has a lot of freedom, well, essentially I can do whatever I want. I don't always feel like that helps me grow artistically, so this was a really good experience for me. There were times that I liked things that he didn't and vice versa, but I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.

Since my field of work is designing fonts, I thought it would be fun to design a title font especially for this book. After I showed the author the title, he asked about using that font throughout the book. I made a quick mock-up font of what it might look like, so he could plug it in to see if it would work. I made it clear that the font was incomplete, and if he liked it, I would polish it up. He told me not to bother with the font after I sent him the mock font, so I didn't. But then when he sent me the proof, he had used my un-polished font!

I know most people probably won't even care, or notice, the font, but I see it and all I can think of is all the work it still needs! Oh well. I also designed a progressive swirling "blast" graphic for the head of each chapter.

If you are a bookworm, I recommend this book. It's similar to Ender's Game and Hunger Games and is geared towards a juvenile audience (so it's not too graphic or inappropriate). To learn more about it, check out the site here, and you can buy it here.