Book Cover Illustrations

Nearly final book cover illustration for Wired by Douglas E. Richards.

Generally book covers result from a sketch or two, one of which strikes the publisher’s fancy, and from there the illustrator starts polishing the idea, working his magic to create the final book cover artwork.

But there are projects where an seemingly endless number of ideas get tossed around before finally reaching the finish line. And the work toward creating the cover for Douglas E. Richards’ techno-thriller Wired proved to be such a project.

Going into the project, we were pretty sure we wanted a pattern of neurons (and Douglas had secured a reference photo of these which we used throughout the project). And a figure. We started with a somewhat garish blue version of the neurons with faces or figures weaved into them. None of these were too great, so I changed course with a series of gray/black pictures with the neurons having an embossed look to them. Here’s one of the better of those efforts:

A proposed cover having embossed neurons in the background and an armed man in the foreground.

After a whole series of these (with a man, woman, man and woman, and helicopters) we decided to scrap the gray/black idea and turned to the idea of a woman rather than a man on the cover.

Studies have found that while men tend to look more closely at a book having a woman on the cover, women tend to divide their attention equally between a male and female figure. So while ideally you might have one of each on a cover, when working with an ebook format where there’s less room and ideally one figure, it’s often best to go with a female rather than a male (in theory at least).

Since Douglas’ book has both a strong male and a strong female character, we opted to put a woman on the cover.

Here’s one of those. And she’s sadly buried inside the neurons in this version:

A female character -- buried in neurons -- in this book cover illlustration.

So next I created several illustrations where the female was brought to the forefront of the cover:

Version of the book cover illustration with the female charter in the foreground and a helicopter in the distance.

Another version of the book cover, this time with the neurons in the titling text.

These seemed to be a little generic, so we returned to the figure in the thicket of neurons which everyone giving us input on the illustrations had seemed to like at least a little.

Another book cover illustration with female character, this time in a thicket of neurons.

The blue seemed a bit garish in this version, so we returned to the earlier greenish blue version of the neurons but this time exposed more of our female character. This would eventually become the final cover (and I should note that the quote over the title in this version is just a placeholder for the final quote).

The final version of the book cover artwork for Wired.

Throw in the 20 or so sketches I haven’t shown here, and that’s all there was to it (ha). But that said, I don’t regret all the extra work on this project because I learned a lot, and we also ended with a beautiful cover (in my humble opinion) which always makes all the blood, sweat, and tears that go into creating such a cover illustration seem more than worthwhile.

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When he’s not creating endless variations on a book cover illustration theme, Duncan Long can still be found at his computer creating other artwork of one sort or another. See more of his book cover artwork: Duncan’s Portfolio
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