A Four-Colour Psychochronography

I 'complain' that I'm busy a lot.  This is mostly because I am often busy.  I'm not always busy with art, or with my day job (although of course these two things combined account for the vast majority of my time breathing), but other things as well, like relaxing in front of the TV, trawling Pinterest for references, keeping on top of my messages (in various places), video games, reading, eating, and sleeping.  You know, life? It tends to add up. Fairly low on that list of priorities, but still a priority, is writing blog posts.

Phil Sandifer on the other hand, has blog posts as one of his main priorities.  Blogging, and subsequently making books from those posts (with many additions and edits of course), is his day job, so he blogs a lot.

Previously I've done book covers for his collections based on his still ongoing TARDIS Eruditorum series of blog posts, and also on the book he wrote about Wonder Woman (A Golden Thread), which didn't appear on his blog.  A series of books and a blog covering every episode and a huge amount of tangential material of the 50 year history of Doctor Who (with some of those episodes being covered in 12,000+ word essays) is not enough for Dr. Sandifer though.

Yes, he actually is a Doctor, in English, and possibly in awesome.  A doctorate of awesome would be a useful thing to have, come to think of it, I wonder where you'd get one.

With his blog rapidly approaching the present time of the show he's cast around for something else to cover when he catches up, and found it in the form of the passive feud between writers (and self proclaimed magicians) Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.  Now I can't pick sides there as I'm an enormous fan of both their works (though not enormous enough to have read everything by them), and Phil doesn't pick sides either.  His work is presented as the history of a war distant enough that there are no stakes in the winners.  Not dry and dispassionately though, but with a wink and some dry wit and humour.  The 'war' is really just a framing device for a vast and sprawling canvas; the actual chapters covering topics as diverse as the influence of J.G. Ballard, Robert R Crumb, and Edward Blake, to the narrative structures of aristotelian literature (and so on), as well as the works, and influence upon them by 'the war', of other writers, such as Neil Gaiman.

It sounds insane.  It is insane.  The good Doctor is a self proclaimed Mad Man With a Blog after all.

Writing blogs doesn't make money though - as a Day Job it's pretty low income stuff, unless you have a huge and sprawling readership and lots of ads.  Phil's blog has minimal ads, and a moderate following among a certain type of intellectual nerd (as well as less intellectual nerds like me, who just like his writing style), so he's running a Kickstarter to fund it.  And since (to paraphrase C3PO) he's worked with me before, he asked me to knock him up a nice banner for the jam-jar shaking.

Still here?  Oh good.  That may be the longest Cold Open I've ever written, so I hope it was worth the wait.  If it wasn't keep going, there's a mid-episode twist a little way down.  You can expand the images by clicking on them by the way - I'd recommend it for the one above.  And now back to our scheduled programming.

So, I could have just doodled some stuff, slapped a logo on it and called it a day, or thrown together a simple photo montage. There's no challenge in that though, so I immediately thought of doing charcoal portraits.  Because I'm such an expert in Charcoal! Right? Ha, hahaha.  This was decision was actually before I'd done the Robots for my son, so it's not like I really had any reason to be confident I could do it.  Anyway, he asked in The Time of Ultimate Busyness, so I had to tell him it would be a few weeks, but I'd do something in charcoal.  It was a week after that I started on the robots.

Anyway, eventually I sat down and did a preliminary sketch of what was in my head.  I had a photo of Alan Moore available, but I wasn't being terribly careful about the accuracy of the sketch.  I just wanted to firm up in my head what I wanted.   Obviously it's terrible, but it did it's job.

After that I wanted to see if it might be better served as a comic style rendering, so I did it again in a style vaguely reminiscent of Kevin O'Neil (who illustrated The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen).  I liked it, but it wasn't going to work for what I wanted, so it was back to the charcoal idea that I was now less sure of, having done the robot pics.

This was my initial pencil sketch of Moore.  I used a grid to get the basic proportions and angles of his head right, with the rest of it just being measured with a pencil and a pair of dividers.  I'm hopeless at judging angles (as you may have noticed over the years), which was why I resorted to the grid.  Cheating?  No - but we'll get to that in an A-Musing post soon enough.  Other than his head I used about six different photographs as reference to get the rest of it down.  I left the medals blank, intending to put some references on them (such as one of them being a smiley face), but then I forgot completely, and they stayed blank until the end.

I then traced the sketch (with tracing paper - the first time I've used it in, well, since the Robots, but before that long enough that I don't remember using it before), and transferred it to the toned sketch  pad that I'd previously drawn robots on.  I wish there was some clever technique I could harp on about after that, but really it just boiled down to "Shading it in charcoal,"  which is fairly boring and not terribly informative.  I did try blending the charcoal here and there, and discovered the charcoal I was using was a little firm for it - I've bought softer charcoal since then, so I might try doing it some other time.  Also I did relight the picture of Moore I was working in, so all the shadows are a little deeper and he's lit more from the left (our right).

Phil was happy with this, so when I had the chance I did the same thing for Grant Morrison.  Here's the pencil sketch.  This was done in exactly the same way, with the only real difference being that I only used two references for his body (one of them being from a publicity still of a popular UK drama, so less said about that the better - I did change it a bit though).  I also drew his eye a little large - this is after I scaled it down slightly, but really, unless you were looking for it you wouldn't notice the difference it was that slight.

The actual shading didn't go as well though.  I tried to relight him the same way I had for Moore, but overdid under his eyes a bit (okay, a lot).    This looked fine on paper, so I fixed it with fixative and then scanned it in, but after doing so the darkness there was just overbearing.  I couldn't just erase the black, since I'd fixed the charcoal, and I didn't want to do it digitally or the whole point of having an actual original for a change would be lost.  My solution was to grab a Prisamcolor white pencil (waxier than a charcoal one, which I thought would be advantageous) and gently run it over the top of the fixed charcoals.  This took a couple of attempts, but as you can see it eventually worked fairly well.

Here's the finished Grant Morrison picture.  I think it's less of a likeness than the Moore one, but still recognisable.  Next time I do something like this I'm going to stick with the lighting in the original picture, I swear.

By the way, you may recall me lamenting a long time ago that my scanner had a tendency to skew things when I scanned them, but that I had no proof that this was the case rather than my just drawing things a little off and not being able to tell on paper.  Well, now I know.  This picture had a border around it so I could accurately judge the scale.  The border was a perfect rectangle, but when I scanned it, well, it wasn't.  Thankfully Photoshop has a distort tool that allowed me to get it back to the correct shape, but that's certainly something I'll have to keep an eye on in future as I won't always have such a defined guideline for straightening it back up.

After that I just needed to do the banner itself.  This meant placing the two scanned pictures next to each other, adding a logo and making it all look a little aged.  The aging and compositing was done in Photoshop of course, with the paper's aging done with a combination of textured overlays and custom brushes (I'll have to share those at some point, a great set for wear and tear).  Above is the first pass, and, if you scroll up and down between this and the final one at the top there, you'll see that the logo changed a bit between here and there, as well as the banner proportions being changed.  Most of the extra stuff on the logo is just done with a combination of traced paths and victorian style clipart.  I could have done the flourishes, but time was short.  Other than that the 'in' was changed because neither of us liked it in this version.  The border in the final was also done partially with clip art, which saved some time, even though it wouldn't have been terribly difficult to have done that without.

And that's it - the ridiculous and slightly roundabout route to a relatively simple Kickstarter banner.

Oh.... But there's more.

Going back a bit to when Phil first asked for the banner, and my first communication with him on it, he'd also mentioned doing an E-Book cover for the individual chapters he releases as he goes along.  One that might do double duty of the first printed volume too.  You can see the end result above, but here's a brief explanation at how it was arrived at.

Before I got to working on the Alan Moore charcoal image, I took some time in between drawing Robots to do some mockups.  My initial inclination was to just use the Kickstarter images (which didn't exist at this point), or painted versions of the same (either digital or actual paint - I hadn't really thought enough about it to decide either way).  To that end I included some actual portraits from the Boer War and First World War as placeholders (I think it's Field Marshal Sir Frederick Roberts and Major General Sir Andrew Russell as the stand ins there, though names of peers can get a little strange, so I might be a bit off).

They were all looking like fairly reasonable "History of the War" type designs; the sort of thing you see in the reduced price sections of Barnes and Noble, and also boring as shit.  I decided to mix it up a little with what I was thinking for the Kickstarter banner, and what I know of Phil's general preferences, and added a little Victoriana and whimsy to the affair.  Newspaper, Periodical, Propaganda, that sort of thing.

When I did the boxing one I had an inkling that it would be the one he'd pick, but I did a couple extra just to be on the safe side. Reshuffled the results a little to fit a better format frame (originally they were in two rows) and sent them off to the Doctor.  He did of course pick the boxing poster.

From there it should have been a simple case of rescaling the thumbnail, adding new images of the boxers and redoing the grime, as all the text and the Union Jack* were fonts or vectors.  In other words, I could make the text and flag as big as I wanted with no loss in quality, but the rest had to be done manually.  Didn't work out that way though.  I don't have a copy of the version I just scaled up, but at the larger size the text just wasn't working, and the whole thing was a little bland.

To fix this I went through each bit of text, and sought out a better typeface for each.  Sometimes I'd find a perfect typeface, but I'd need to embellish it a bit to fit with the sensational nature of the poster.  I'd also add a little "bleed" to the red and blue, as if the inks hadn't come quite so perfectly off the presses.  It's subtle, and hard to see at all on the e-book,but it might read well enough if it ever sees print.

In actuality posters like this didn't really start appearing until the early 20th century as far as I can tell (shortly after World War 1), and of course the styles of text and such had changed drastically by then, so I combined the layouts and styles of Victorian playbills with the spectacle and portraits of the later boxing posters.  I think it looks fairly authentic, even if it's an enormous anachronism.

As before with the kickstarter banner, the weathering came from scans, images found online and custom brushes.  The stain is mostly modern paper stained with tea. The fading of the colours and black ink is done partly with photoshop filters, and partly with some photographs of stained concrete I took a while back.  More clipart here too, in the shape of the filigree under "presents" and the leaf-like swirls around "This Event" and "Albion".  The original hands pointing to "presents" here were clipart, but I swapped them out for some I drew in the final version.

All that was left to do after all that was to add the fighters.  This was simple enough; just find two pictures of victorian boxers, and draw them with vague likenesses of the combatants for their heads.  No measuring or anything for these, I just sketched them in my sketchbook and then inked them with a thin pen.  I was careful to keep the shading to horizontal lines only, for a slightly more Victorian feel (I usually use a lot of crosshatching when I ink).  I filled in my Alan Moore illustration before scanning, but for Grant Morrison I was lazy (because there is more shadow) and added the solid blacks in Photoshop after scanning.  The image above is the original line art as I scanned it.

And that really is all.  Eventually I'll need to do a back cover to go with it, and I might tweak the front some more while I'm about it.  Unlike the TARDIS books these will all have the same simple design for the back covers and spines, giving me more time and energy to go a little crazy on the front ones of the series.  What will the next one entail?  Only time will tell, and it might be a while before I have to think about it terribly hard.

You can back the Last War in Albion Kickstarter here, With more information about the currently available chapters over on Philip Sandifer's blog.

*Or Union Flag, if you want to be pedantic.  It's not a flag though, it's a symbol of a flag on a screen, and since it's neither flying on a building or on a ship I can call it what I bloody well like.

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"?

A Psychochronography in Blue (Part 4)

As is suitable for a TARDIS Eruditorum cover post the story begins in the past.  If you want to go right back to the beginning you can check out the previous posts for volumes 1 2 3 (click the numbers) and the tangentially related A Golden Thread before we continue.

But those are not the beginning of the tale of this book cover, except in the way that my parents being born is the beginning of mine.  No, this books gestation began way back in Phil's Blog, but the cover began back in June, when I had the idea for the cover.  Except it wasn't to be this book's cover, because both I and Phil both agreed it would make a better cover for Volume 5, and thus it shall be.  This left me lacking an idea for this book though, so I went to do some roughs, which after a surprisingly small number of adventures would eventually lead to the following.

As you can see, the style of the cover is quite different to the previous ones, and is suitable not only for the single doctor the book focuses on, but should also carry a very suitable vibe from that period of time.  It wasn't always that way though - I knew I wanted Jelly Babies to be the focus in some way, but I really wasn't sure how to get it.  Here are the roughs as I did them, you'll note the last one looks completely different to the others, and I'll get to why in a moment.

So, this is the first time anyone has seen these, including Phil.  I didn't send them to him because A) the rest are awful and B) I sort of knew he'd love the last one anyway.  Sure enough when I sent it to him he basically said "Hell yes that one" and he was amused (as was I) that it was a completely unsuitable cover for the Gothic Horror vibe that settles on Doctor Who during these years (goodness knows what I would have done if he'd hated it).

You'll note the other covers are also not terribly Gothic Horror - but they're not all that mid 70's either - that's why I do roughs; to work toward the feeling and vibe that I want.  Except in this case it was pointless because after the grinning silhouette cover I went and made a cup of tea and  saw the box for the tea bags. This made me think of how crap packaging is these days (Tetley tea, in America, has packaging that looks like women's sanitary products.  I kid you not), which made me think how awesome packaging used to be (design wise, not freshness wise), and then I knew what I had to do.  Something that evoked, but wasn't identical to, Jelly Baby packaging of the 70's.

To get the Jelly Babies for the last one I just traced the 3D one I'd sculpted for the one on it's far left.  Yes, I sculpted a Jelly Baby that looked a bit like Tom Baker.  I named him Jelly Baker.

I don't think I sent Phil the tiny thumbnail though, I think I sent him this one:

Which is basically identical, but I made it a bit larger.  Knowing that if Phil was going to like it I'd have to do the Jelly Babies again, I did them on a separate sheet as vectors - the only downside being that after scaling I had to rasterize them to get the lines (Don't fret if this means nothing - if just means there was an extra step each time I needed a different size baby, but I didn't need to redraw them all over again).  Here's the result of that - not that you need it, you can see the results in almost every image on the page.  Of course if I used Illustrator this would be a moot point, but I don't have Illustrator, so there.

So Phil signed off on it and I got to work on the larger cover.  I wasn't happy with the layout or choice of the fonts though, so I went to find something more suitable, and Phil wanted some changes in the choice of text.  Phil was also concerned that the wear and tear to the paper wouldn't be evident against the white, so I fiddled with the staining of the paper a bit, eventually settling on having it more stained than the 'white' of the design rather than less, as it worked better visually.

The font I settled on for TARDIS needed a little tinkering with to make it work for the text above it, but otherwise it all went quite smoothly.  The back cover was based on a book I have from the time period, although the border to the text and colours are different.  I also decided to keep the back cover mainly blue as I wanted the spine to be blue (as is the intention for the whole series, and always has been) and it looked odd having the spine blue, and then going back to white for the back cover.  This was finished back in early September, with the re-sizing of the spine and the replacement of the temporary rear blurb text being the only work still needing to be done.  Phil got me the final page count and rear text a couple of weeks ago, and that required some re-sizing of the spine elements. I took the opportunity to bulk up the title text there a little too.
All in all it was a very smooth cover, and despite it's simplicity I'm very pleased with it.  And that would usually be it, but this time there are a couple of caveats.

Firstly, this is the first Eruditorum cover available with a matte finish.  It's long been a minor irritation that the covers have to be glossy, as this breaks the aged illusion somewhat.  Not completely (I've fooled at least one person I've shown them to who didn't realised I'd designed them and wanted to know about "the old Doctor Who books on your shelf"), but enough that it's bothered me.  Createspace now allows Matte finishes, and Phil proofed this one with that in mind.  The results are apparently far better (I've yet to see more than  photograph), so any additional prints of the last two books will also be with matte covers - not A Golden Thread though - that one it all about the gloss.

The second caveat is that when Phil did his kickstarter for Volume One: 2nd Edition there was a stretch goal for merchandise.  Vol 1.2 isn't available yet (He was, quite reasonably, waiting to see what the 50th anniversary held before going ahead with it), but we've set up a storefront for when it is.  Up until yesterday it contained a T-shirt and some Mugs for volume 2 (my mug hasn't arrived yet, but my T-shirt looks great), but it made sense to do a mug and shirt for volume 4 to tie in with it's release.

For this I made a few small changes to the design.  Firstly I increased the number of babies on the image.  While I wanted the book cover to be bold and obvious, the associated products can be a little more obscure, and I like the idea of the 'Jelly Baker' being less overt in the image.  If you want an overt version there's both a mug and shirt available with just the Jelly Baker.

I've also put in the "Jelly baby?" question.  This isn't using an existing font, as I wanted it to be more reminiscent of the 70's Bassets Jelly Babies logo.  I found a font that was sort of similar and then modified it heavily to match the classic logo, without it being identical (The Capital B is lower case here for example).  The question mark had to be done from scratch, and I made it subscript to keep the lowercase feeling of the question (Having it higher made it feel more forceful rather than inquisitive for some reason).

Finally I decided to remove the wear, and that might be the case for many of these going forward (just the merch, not the book covers).  Convincingly wearing a book cover is relatively easy, as you have the entire area to work with, but for a Shirt or mug you just have the printed part, which is a small portion of the whole.  Hopefully my graphic skills are good enough that I don't have to rely on the aging for them to look good.

And that really is your lot, except for the links where you can buy all the goodies.

Phil's post on the launch is here (when it goes live in the morning at least)
The book is available here (there are more options in Phil's post too)
Mugs and T-Shirts available here

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!