How 2 cover (Patreon)

I hate making covers XD They have to be painted at a large size and my computer reeeeally doesn't like it. So like in most situations, it's a lot easier to make the final piece after doing a lot of thumbnail iterating. 

The first image above is my KS preview image which I made a few weeks ahead of the KS campaign (I brought this preview with me to ECCC to show anyone who asked about it)

This cover is based on the MI cover philosophy I outlined in the previous post, and also the very first image I did for MI advertisements on Hiveworks before I had any clue what the cave scenes would look like. At that time I was mostly focused on making sure that the colors really popped and gave a sci-fi/ mysterious/ oceany feeling, which is the same feel I want for the cover, so it makes sense in my head to just roll with it. 

As you can see I just flubbed the helmet cuz I hadn't designed it yet haha. Anyways, the colors and deep silhouetting are very similar to these original promos. 

The main post image shows a few of the iterations. Mostly trying to inject movement into rocks, which isn't terribly difficult if you're an illustrator, but I'm not an illustrator so it takes me a little longer to figure things out. Went from a smooth-ish outline of rocks to a more jagged one, then added a diagonal which then became the honeycombing like in the setting near the end of Chapter 4. Also pushed around the sizes of the figures to be larger or smaller... Since Kalla is so confusing I thought it'd be okay to put her larger in the foreground of the back cover since she's weird looking enough that it doesn't spoil anything, and put the two kids in the center framed by rock (with no stalactites/ mites) so they are the only two things that stand out against the blue. Also threw my psylocibin rocks back there cuz I like them

After that, it's time to transfer them to the template. Here's a basic view of the template I made for my covers (originally made this for Alloy, which is why this is yellow). Got my two flaps, my front and back cover, and a lot of padding. I also mark off where the creasing will be on the book because that can make a big difference on the eye irt title centering. I estimated my centering a bit incorrectly on The Meek cover, so it isn't quite as perfect as I had hoped for, but it's an easy correction for Mare and all future books. 

I'll post the final cover a bit later in its own post since I like it a lot... well, it'll be a wallpaper too which I'll share here so maybe I'll just do the entire thing then. 

One last note: I got a lot of mixed reactions from friends/ family when I showed them this, a lot of them didn't like it or weren't excited by it. I'm a HUGE stickler for covers, I think they're the most important image of the work and need to be as strong as possible to hook someone who has never seen your book before. Intellectually, I know that this basic cover design could have been made flashier or more epic or more this or that. But my gut says that I've been operating under a certain range of decisions up until this point, and honestly the point of the book at this moment isn't to rake in the cash. It's to make a single complete work that I'm proud of, and which reflects a lot of influences that were important to me as a fledgling scifi reader. So I guess I just wanted to mention that there's no "perfect" piece of art, even if there are a lot of optimal options. For mass market I'd probably choose a different approach but for a personal, indie-published piece like this, it feels most honest to go in this direction, and I'm happy to commit to it~