A Psychochronography in Red, White and Blue

And here, sooner than planned, a new book cover.  This time though there's a twist - despite the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who being in less than a month, this is not a Doctor Who cover.  In one way it was far simpler than those, and in a couple of others gave me some pause for thought.

While not a Who cover, it is a cover for Dr. Sandifer (or Phil as he's known to his friends (I assume - I've never actually spoken to the good doctor except via i-correspondence (that's email to you (and yes, I did just do, and am still doing, a run on sentence with four sets of nested parentheses - hardcore). It's for his latest exploration into psychochronography, titled A Golden Thread: An Unofficial Critical History of Wonder Woman.

Which subject led to the first pause for thought: Given the legendary litigiousness of the US comics industry, how do you do a cover for a book about Wonder Woman without actually featuring Wonder Woman on it?

Read on oh truthful reader, and discover the answer, and more...

So there's the cover (clickable for enbiggability, as are all the images that follow) - Hopefully it inspires thoughts of an attractive raven haired superwoman, despite lacking any imagery of her (If I have done my job poorly than you may instead be expecting a political thriller set within the walls of the White House - it was a fine line to tread) .  How myself and Phil arrived at this is chronicled as follows.

It all began with an email from Phil saying he didn't need me to do the cover for this one.  This may strike you as odd, given that the cover is directly above, but in fact it wasn't odd at the time - he had an actual honest to goodness publisher interested - and while they might have been interested in Phil's words they were not interested in some part time wannabe cover artist.  This held no surprise for me, so I just got on with some Doctor Who ones that were bound to come in handy eventually.

Phil's publishing deal unfortunately fell through, and he mentioned some aspects of cover design of his now to be self-published book in some unrelated emails; it never went much further than that.  Then, at the worse possible time (see previous post) I receive an email with something along the lines of "I don't think I ever officially offered you the Wonder Woman cover.  Do you want it?"  Well, of course I did, so I got to doing some thumbnails - time was tight this time, the book was basically done, and just needed setting and someone to do the cover.

The top row were the first thumbnails I sent him.  With time being tight I didn't have a lot of time to come up with amazing ideas, so the results were a little limited compared to what I usually send him.  Nevertheless they provoked discussion, which was the important thing.  One and Five were dismissed immediately (I was secretly happy about this - they would have been very difficult to pull off in time), as was cover two as it held the greatest chance of us getting sued (though I think we were both sad about that - there was some real potential there.  Cover three was deemed worthy of further exploration, and Phil liked cover four because the stars evoked "A series of failed utopias" which is apparently a central theme of the book.  The stars are actually representative of the decades in which WW has been around (that's Wonder Woman, not Weight Watchers), but I'll take it, and decided to pursue the idea.

Second and third rows were the next round, all variations on a theme.  Phil immediately picked #3 and #5, the "misfit" stars being to busy on the other variations.  My personal favourite (#8) was rejected for being too bottom heavy - and to be fair I think in retrospect Phil made the right choice, as while it's still my favourite, it needed some curves to help evoke WW's femininity.  I really liked the star 'A' logo though, so decided to try that with the two preferred covers.  I also felt that the Misfit stars should go on the back rather than the front (sorry e-book-buyers, no Misfits for you), and so #5 was going to be a feature of the back cover either way.

The final row is of the last two revisions, each with the same back cover and a very rough idea for the spine.  Phil chose #1 (obviously), and again I think this was the correct choice due to the curves.  I had added a dark gradient to the cover to help Phil's name stand out along with the 'A' logo and a second curve to add a little more depth.  Phil never expressed his thoughts on these alterations - his email simply read "Number One!"

Before I received that email though I needed to ensure I  could do a reasonable looking gold at a much larger scale.  I decided to do it with the large star, since it was going to be present whichever cover was chosen.  I also had a go at adding the gold effect to Phil's name, and neither myself or Phil were happy with this first attempt.  The star was more successful though, but involved far to many layers for me to use the technique on the whole cover (even my recently upgraded PC has some limitations on it's memory).  I needed to come up with a better method that looked just as good (I kept the big star as it was for the rear cover though - no point wasting it).

This was the first pass at the front cover, with the second iteration of the gold on Phil's name (much better), and The first pass at the gold on the two curves.  I say first pass, but it was also the last pass as I was pretty happy with the solution on the first go.  To get a better look at how it's done let's look at the 'A' logo as it progresses.  The one in the above image just has the simple gradient I used for the thumbnails on it.

 So first of all I masked out the various shapes I wanted.  Since I wanted it to look 3D I had to split the shape along the middle, and alternate light and dark for each segment in order to get the sharp changes in shade at the corners.  These foul colours are not used in the final image - they're just to make selecting the various parts easier.

Secondly I took a black and white image of some American flags (taken on July 4th, and heavily manipulated), and distorted it based on the divisions made in the first step.  I then removed the parts of the image that were not needed for the star (They're actually just masked out, so I could still move them around if needed).  Yes, I just used a Photoshop Layer Effect for the red interior, it did the job well enough for what I wanted.

The next step (Bottom Left) was to use yet another layer effect on the star shape and overlay it on the black and white metal.  This one was a Bevel and Emboss.  It definitely looked too "Layer FX" though, which is not a good thing (If you're not a Photoshop user you're probably not aware of the dirty looks this can get you in the right circles).  I needed a way to change that, which turned out to be very simple.

In the last step I've simply added a colour gradient to the gold, and revealed part of the US flags photo over the red star part (I was confident the actual text that was to go here would disguise the rest of the obvious Layer Effects).  A Color Gradient is simply a strip of colour - anything on the left replaces the black in an image, and on the right the white - with anything in between changing the range of greys (or colours, which can be considered the same thing in this case).  The actual gradient used took a while to arrive at - though in the end I just threw the gradient used in the thumbnail images into the Color Gradient, and it worked perfectly, so I could have saved myself some time if I'd started with that.  Anyway, the result looks a lot less like the Layer Effects look, but also doesn't look like real gold (boring), or Comic Book gold (too simplistic), or Airbrushed 80's Logo gold (too cliche), but is instead somewhere between all of these things, which is exactly what I wanted.

This one is just of the full cover as it stood when I dropped the finished 'A' Logo into place.  Note that the spine is very wide (no page count at this point), and I've added WW's nickname to the back.  I just felt it needed something extra there - though it would move for the final cover.  The text on the back is from TARDIS Eruditorum: Volume 2, as a place holder until Phil could write something to go there.  He eventually did so with a remarkable burst of speed.

These were the stars for the back cover.  In the end I didn't go for all 16 from the original cover, but settled on 10.  Primarily this was done to save time since time was tight, but also because I really didn't feel it needed all of them when half of them would be partly or mostly obscured anyway.  I did these and decided to just repeat them.

Under the stars you can see some of the construction of a couple of them.  The 'flower' star was just interlocking circles with the outer parts removed (not as easy as that makes it sound), while the 80's grid square was achieved by creating a checker board pattern, and then warping it slightly before cutting off the excess parts outside of the star shape.  This one being a lot easier than it sounds.

This image here is of the spine when it was half completed.  I realised I wanted the swoop to unify the front back and spine, but since I had't designed the swoop to do that it took more work than I had planned.  Here you can see the swoop, not having had the photo of the flags correctly set up for it has just gone an almost flat yellow, which isn't terribly interesting.  I compensated by using another copy of the flags image, but that still didn't quite work for me, so I ended up hand painting quite a bit of the spine portion, which also made it easier to have the front and side match correctly.

The final image, above, is of the cover as it appears on the book, held betwixt the fair fingers of the author himself.  This was a rare treat, as usually I don't see the final cover until it arrives at my door - but this time Phil had a proof copy done (actually with a very low res image of the cover - it held up rather well).  This allowed me to check if the reds, blues or the gold were wildly off the mark (as they were on TARDIS Eruditorum 2, with the blue being three shades darker then I was expecting).  They don't appear to be off by much in this photo, and so you can now buy a copy of the tome yourself.

All in all this seemed like a big challenge when I first started it, but it turned out to be relatively straight forward and a lot of fun.  It's also made interesting by the fact that I haven't aged it like I do the Who covers - so I didn't have to balance the actual design with the amount of wear and tear and fading and grunge, so I had the training wheels off, so to speak.  They'll be on again for the next cover though.

If you're interested in reading about my previous covers the Psychochronography in blue series started a while ago.  Here's Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.  If you want to learn more about the book (or even buy it) you can head over to Dr. Sandifer's Emporium of Pasley Wonders and Finery.  It's highly recommended.

Also, Ghastly Haloweeeeeeen!