Vero Rising (2013)
A bumpy start to a series
It is often the case these days that book publishers will approach an illustrator with a brief that spells out pretty much what they want to see. There are reasons why they do this, and sometimes those reasons are inflexible. But I have always believed that the more you allow an artist to bring their creative skills to the table, the better. We are trained to deal with specific concepts or scenes we're given, but we enjoy and even thrive on interpretation. We just don't get to do it as often, these days.
So it was with this cover. I was given two scenes from the book by Laurice Molinari that the client wanted to see sketches for, and I was given only the text from the book that described these scenes. That's helpful on its own--sometimes you just get the description from the publisher, without the text. I read through them and immediately thought it might be tricky--the scenes were pretty specific, and one did not lend itself well to great image-making because of the odd camera setup required to do it.
