A Psychochronography in Blue (Part...1)

There are many fictional conceptions of time. Quantum Leap postulated it was like a ball of string, many other shows and films conceptualize a river, with the future being down stream. Doctor Who simply says it's, well, 'timey wimey' (says it a lot actually, even I'm beginning to think it's getting old), but in the case of this post we can think of it as an Ouroboros; the serpent with it's tale in it's mouth. The end as the beginning.

While this is part one of this increasingly lengthy saga there is a part zero of a sort, you can read that here, and the posts for part 2, 3 and 4 if you click the numbers. The tangentially related A Golden Thread can be found by clicking its title. I highly recommend you do read part zero if nothing else - time travel is complicated enough without you skipping all the slow bits.

"Time can be rewritten" is a popular part of Philip Sandifer's TARDIS Eruditorum, and in this case it sort of has been.

In one version of history I created a speculative book cover for the first entry in the series based on his popular blog. He liked it, but already had another artist. She continued to work on his books for many years, while I went off and had a quiet life with the occasional portrait commission. That is not this version.

In another he liked the spec and hired me on the spot. The cover was a disappointment to me if not him and I declined the opportunity to continue ruining his delightful book series. That too is not this version.

In this version I failed to do the first cover, but got to do the second. Given what I had learned doing the spec for book one, as well as in the intervening time, I was quite pleased with the results. I have done covers for him ever since, with the Who ones being "themed" to a degree, but with volume one being a bit of an odd duck as it was in a completely different style by a completely different artist. Time to fix that, time to go back to the beginning.

You may note that this looks remarkably like the speculative cover I did two and a half years ago, but hopefully more polished and in a lighter blue (since one thing I've learned is that blue prints darker than you'd expect). This shouldn't come as a terrible surprise of course; I'd already designed it once, no point doing so again. Since I needed to make it print res anyway I thought I'd tweak it as I went along. Owners of the digital edition may note some small differences in the wear of the front cover - the explanation for that is further down.  By the way, as always in these posts you can click most of the images to enlarge them.

The reason the above image exists is all down to Phil wanting to expand Volume 1.  Initially this was to be just a major re-edit of one of the essays (due to the new availability of a formerly "lost" episode).  He felt that might not be financially viable, so tested the waters by dipping his toe on Kickstarter.  The resulting flood allowed him to purchase the scuba gear required to survive it, and also to not only add the essays he'd planned, but several others as well.  The new book is substantially revised and covers stories right up as far as the 50th Anniversary's An Adventure in Time and Space.

When he did the Kickstarter video it was my Spec image he used for the campaign.  He asked first of course, right before asking if I'd also revisit it for the actual cover.

The first thing I decided to do was to replace the front on image of the doctor with a more natural one, while also removing his hands from his pockets to be replaced by the more iconic hands on lapels pose. I needed to see if Phil agreed with this change, so I quickly traced a photograph of Mr. Hartnell at a small scale and ran it past Phil, with some other possible variations in shade in case he wanted it different. He didn't, and was very pleased I'd included the detail of his ring, as it's relevant to the book. You'll probably note that at this point I was still working with the darker blue of the spec cover. I knew I would need to lighten it up, but at this point I wasn't sure exactly how I wanted it, so I left it as was.

Once the style was chosen I needed an image to replace the traced one with. I felt that using an image directly traced from a photograph was most certainly pushing my luck, and furthermore it felt like a cheat. So I did a sketch including his head, which was a bit rough and ready, so I did a better sketch of his head separately. I'm really not sure why I bothered with his head (twice) since we weren't going to use it, but I think I felt the body needed a head, and then when I wasn't happy with it I wanted to get his likeness a little better. I turned this into a vector image after scanning it so I could scale it as needed for the cover. Like James Cromwell I thought "That'll do pig," but also decided to flip it to better match the composition before dropping it in.  Now it's to late to do anything about it I notice that flipping it has the monocle tucking into the wrong side of his waistcoat.  Ooops.

The ring is on the correct side though, so that's something.

Here's the in progress cover with a lighter blue and the new posed figure on the front. On the back is the sketch of Mr. Hartnell, and you'll see it migrate around a bit in the next image. I liked the idea of someone doodling in the head on the back cover, although in one version there's a different head sketched in pen (which is how I'd have to do it if I really wanted to do this as an actual sketch of Mr. Hartnell would be pushing our luck again) - Eventually I dropped the idea. Even though I like it I feel it's not really appropriate for the mainline series of books.

I also threw in a torn price sticker. This is actually the same price sticker I used on the back of volume 4, but with more of it intact. I thought having years of pricing stickers built up would be interesting and give some real age to it, and while I didn't quite do that I did do something similar. It's a sort of 'fake old book' trope I suppose, but one I liked and had held off doing until now (this was before I did the cover for volume 4). I really wanted a 'Blue Peter Bring and Buy Sale' sticker mark on there too (not the logo though, we'd be pushing our luck yet again - that mark isn't just copyrighted but practically sacred). I resisted the urge. There's always volume 5 for something, maybe a fake coffee ring instead (and before the cries of 'cliche!' ring out too loudly, I do in fact have book with a tea ring on it right next to me... I don't drink coffee).

In this set I'm just fiddling with the layout of the back cover, the amount of wear and tear and the tinting of the blue. Not terribly exciting, which is why I've stuck them into one image. The only thing of note is the method I've used to change the colors - a method that will only really work with this one. As well as the grime layers I have over the top of the image (along with the wear) I have a gradient colour layer which can be set to any gradient of colours I like. The image underneath is in greyscale, as seen in the sketch/vector image above. Using the gradient colour layer (It's actually called a gradient map), you can easily tint the greyscale to any selection of colours you wish. This made it very easy to get the range of blues I wanted to go with without having to individually tweak dozens of vector layers individually.

The last one is of course the final cover with the wrong blurb text on the back, and the spine being much wider than needed, allowing me to scale it more easily when the final page count came in. Print owners (or those looking at the top image) may note that the wear and tear is different to the final book, while digital readers will see it's the same as the one in their download. The reason for this is simple. Phil wanted to put the digital copy out early for his Kickstarter backers, and needed the front cover in a hurry. I snagged this one, and off it went. Then, when I went to do the print cover I realised that I'd somehow put the wear and tear for this book onto Volume 4 when that shipped and had failed to notice when I grabbed the previous digital copy.

This isn't such an issue with the digital version (though it is extremely embarrassing), but on the print version it would be highly obvious when both books are on the same shelf. Couldn't have that, just won't do. Fortunately, while I had accidentally replaced the wear on the fourth volume with this one, that meant that the wear originally intended for Volume 4 was still floating around. I went and found that (I often do the wear on a separate image before bringing it in onto the actual cover - in this case I'd pulled the wrong one into Volume 4's image, so all I had to do was pull Volume 4's (intended) one into this one. Confused? Yes, I was at the time as well.

So now here are two volumes where the Print and Digital versions have slightly different covers (the other being Volume 2 - the print says 'Philip', the digital 'Phil'). I'm okay with that, so long as one doesn't look substantially better than the other I guess. Phil didn't seem terribly bothered by it, and I guess that's the important thing.

I apparently had more to say than I thought.

One last thing... As with volume 4, Phil got a proof copy done, so here are some photos of the finished article.

Phil's post on the book launch can be found here.
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 1 (second edition) can be purchased here
Merchandise for the series is available here (Volume 1 mug and shirt coming soon)

Now, about the slightly unusual title - Really, I had to use that it, how can you ever pass up the chance to use a word like "Psychochronography"?