Tuesday 10 June 2014

Cover Confirmed

The cover for my up coming novel "Atlantis and the Game of Time" has been confirmed:


This is very exciting as, being an artist, I created the cover myself. I would just like to say that I didn't do this because I thought the publisher would do a bad job of it. In fact, I greatly admire the skill of the artists who do their covers. The quality of the covers really are fantastic. I chose to do my own because, being an artist myself, I would have been a very tricky customer. I have a vision already in my head of how things look and it would have been very difficult for another artist to match it. In fact, I usually struggle to match it myself. To give this job to someone else would have been a cruelty, to them and me. I couldn't bear the guilt of that. Saying that, there were a few points, during its construction, where I regretted that decision.

It was a lot of hard work and took up nearly every hour of my spare time for two months as I modeled every building, lamppost, bench etc. You can't see it on the cover, but I intend to render out a fly through as a promotional video, sometime in the near future, which makes this level of detail necessary, as I will be able to take people through the streets and parks. Want to see it now? Sorry you'll have to wait, but the title image of my blog is a very small section of it.

Part of the reason I chose to submit to Kristell Ink is because a number of the authors, signed, are artists as well. I see art and writing as being two sides of the same coin, both deal with creating worlds, it's just that one achieves that through words and the other through images. I don't see myself as a writer and and artist, I see myself as a writer-artist.

I feel my art skills make my writing stronger, allowing me to visualise my worlds, cities and scenes more vividly and adds a richness and grounding that some writers struggle with. I also feel that my writing makes my art stronger, as it allows me to look beyond the visuals of a scene and look at the people, civilisations and communities that inhabit these worlds, thereby adding depth to the images.

If I was ever asked to give up either writing or art and focus on just one, I would say that it is impossible as, for me, both those skills are joined and necessary to the other and cannot exist, in full form, without the other. Anyway, I'll stop here or I might as well do a thesis.  

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