Evolution of an Anthology Cover: Tempo Lush Tales Cover Process with Darker Chi Lynch

So designing the cover for an anthology’s a tricky thing.  Do you focus on an image representing one of the stories inside, or make reference to all of them?  What was I going to put on the front of Tempo Lush Tales that would encompass what the book’s about and make people want to pick it up?

After researching other anthologies (both comics and regular ol’ wordy books) I settled on trying to get an overall vibe of the collection across in a single image.  There’s a variety of styles in the book from dark satire to softer sweetness so I hoped to come up with something that would bridge common ground of all the ideas in the book without focusing on any specific story or character.

I wanted something that showed something of this Earth but with a fantastical twist – something like a flying whale!  This was the perfect image but far from original – a quick google of the term brings all sorts up, plus I was already a fan of the whale sequence from Disney’s wonderful Fantasia 2000, so didn’t want to ape that.

I considered all sorts of flying objects and animals – very hard to find something that hadn’t already been done.  I eventually tried playing with the concept of giant flying pineapples.  See my early messing around with the idea on Photoshop below…

Even as a very rough depiction of the idea, it wasn’t quite gelling for me.  I had plenty of other work to be getting on with so I put the cover aside for a few weeks.

As the deadline for the release of the book was closing in, I turned to artist and designer, Darker Chi Lynch, to see if she could do better than my own attempts.

She was smart and tried quickly getting down on paper loads of possible directions the cover could take, based on talking through my concept for the collection with me…
We both kind of liked the cubes and the big eye thing.  Darker tried playing with the cubes……but didn’t feel it was quite right for the project.  It was a little mathematical and we needed something more organic. The eye definitely seemed the way to go.  We talked about the concept of having the eye in the knots or the rings of a tree trunk…Suddenly things were clicking.

When you cut a tree down you can count the rings of the trunk and tell how many years it had lived for.  We liked the idea of the eye being a spirit from within the tree, able to tell not only how old the tree was but many more stories.
It also made sense that cutting the tree down releases those stories, as paper from the tree would is turned into pages delivering stories to a reader.

Darker did a mock-up on Photoshop of a potential cover, which was pretty close to the final result – it just needed polishing.It was helpful to see the colours she envisioned at this stage.

A tree happened to have been cut down in front of a neighbour’s drive.  I sent photos to Darker for inspiration.She got out her brushes and ink and went to work on the trunk image for the cover as well as the stars hung up with string. She had a few stabs at the title text and the central eye…
She did multiple eyes after we discussed using them as part of the interior design of the book too.  We hadn’t decided what would go where yet or which eye would make it on to the cover.Darker combined the new art with the colours and textures of her earlier Photoshop rough.  She tweaked the title lettering a little, making it white with a shadow to really make it stand out.And there you have it.  Thanks very much to Darker Chi Lynch – hope I can work with her again!

You can get hold of a copy of Tempo Lush Tales here!