AndrewVega's AI Offspring book artwork by artist illustrator Duncan Long

Here’s the cover illustration for A. J. Vega’s science fiction adventure A. I. Offspring.

The cloud of “smoke” coming from the gal’s hand is an outpouring of tiny nanobots… I’ll not say more since I don’t want to give away too much of the plot.

From a design standpoint, having just one of the three elements (eyes, gal, crystal device) on the cover might have worked better. However with a little juggling and experimentation, we were able to adjust things so all three elements worked well together.

Part of the trick in achieving a unified look was to tilt everything a bit off the horizontal/vertical orientation, and add a lot of atmospherics (smoke/fog/light) to “fill” the spaces and bring everything together. Using a blue “overlay” then brought everything into be in the same color space.

Below is one of the early concept sketches for the cover. As you can see, a lot changed from color to the crystal “conduit” which houses the artificial intelligence consciousness. However some of the basic elements find their way to the final version, including the tilted AI eyes at the top and the gal — rotated for a head-on frontal view for the final cover design.

AndrewVega AI Offspring book artwork by artist illustrator Duncan Long

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Duncan Long is a freelance magazine and book illustrator who has created magazine and book artwork for Ballistic Publications, HarperCollins, PS Publishing, Pocket Books, Solomon Press, Fort Ross, and many other publishers and self-publishing authors. See his book illustrations at: http://DuncanLong.com/art.html
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