Cerulean Isle

I did a book cover recently for the fine folks over at Wido publishing. They were very kind and forgiving of my consistent unprofessionalism. The cover they let me do was for Cerulean Isle, by G.M. Browning.

I asked for ideas they wanted me to try out and they just told me to have fun with it. I submitted a version of the above picture and they liked the concept and we went from there.

Funny thing about the concept though, as it required a great deal more work than I anticipated to bring it to fruition as a final product. During the process I kept wanting to tell the great people over at Wido that it was good enough. But I am an author too, and I would be really disappointed if my cover artist half-assed a cover for a novel that I may have spent years perfecting. So I kept go back over it until all of us were happy.

Funnily enough, I spent most of my time reworking the back cover of the book. My first version had the owner of that fin pictured coming out of the water. I had been trying to portray a scene from the novel, but had gotten enough details wrong that the idea had to be scrapped altogether. Still, check out an early version of the wrap around cover:

Notice how dolphin-like the tail was at first... because I used a dolphin as a model

Yes, my son was serving as my merlord model, I've been using him as a model for all sorts of my art projects for his entire life, so it was no big deal to him. But in the end, he was scrapped for the open ocean.

By the end, I felt pretty good about how things went. The final version, had several other changes to it before it was sent to the printer, although I had nothing to do with the back cover text or spine design:

Anyhow, the process took a bit longer than I wanted it too, but I love how it turned out. I also have a host of other covers I'm working on this month. 

Happy days everyone.