Had the LiveJournal RSS feeds not been screwy, I might’ve seen this last week when Jennifer de Guzman pointed it out. Better late than never.
In any case, SLG Publishing Art Director Scott Saavedra breaks down the cover-design process for the recently released graphic novel The Clarence Principle:
Pictured … is Shari Chankhamma’s (the artist) and Fehed Said’s (the writer) original “final” cover for The Clarence Principle. According to their blog getting to this stage was a bit of a trial but they felt victory was at hand. And then I came along and pulled the rug out from under them. Nice guy.
It wasn’t until I was working on promotional material for The Clarence Principle that I even saw the cover art — months and months after Shari and Fehed had “finalized” it. I found myself staring at the cover as I worked and something about it bothered me. After a bit I realized that my eyes kept being pulled to the empty center of the cover and away from the important elements all around. I felt that there was a strong cover in those elements, it just needed to be teased out. It seemed to me that the two most important elements were the flying heart and the reaching hand (since I hadn’t read the book yet this was purely a gut reaction on my part). I didn’t like the fact that the flying heart appeared anchored to the right edge of the cover so I set it free. And I made the reaching hand more central because I felt that attention needed to be drawn to the scars on the wrist. I removed the head as it was an unhelpful distraction.
You read a preview of The Clarence Principle here.
