Last year, Kerstin Hall’s novella The Border Keeper came out from Tor.com, and I did the cover art! It was revealed last year on Bookish, but that post has vanished now, so here are some process details — with a video.
It’s a beautiful, luminous, vast novella, and I recommend it. But to capture that, the art process went through a few iterations — a very clear initial concept had to be shelved (for good reasons) and then it was an adventure to capture the sense of shifting through of the book. Here are a couple of the later sketches.
Since it covers multiple worlds (one of the reasons it feels so spacious, I think) there were many elements to try and include.
Not least among which was everyone’s favourite crab-baby.
With so many details I had to cut a few test patches, to see how fine I could get the (e.g.) barbwire (the crab-baby, alas, had to be further simplified).
Usually my silhouettes are a single piece. This time, to catch the difference in colouring and allow for some sizing adjustments, I cut it in three pieces: trees, wire, and Border Keeper.
Here is a video of part of the process (time lapse, obviously, and if you catch a glimpse of a bandage it was not from the knife — I had an incident with a julienne peeler):
And here is the final cover for the novella.
Wow. As always, I am in awe of your work. The intricacies, and technical difficulties are mind blowing. So much work going into one one, beautiful, breathtaking image.
Thank you! The videos are really interesting because it lets me get outside my own head and watch it just… happening. From inside one’s own head, the experience is quite different. More murder mysteries and meditative states.
😊
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