Book Cover Illustrations

I recently had the pleasure of creating the illustration for the front cover of Charles Waugh’s new science fiction novel Nu: Book 1, The Esss Advance.

The author settled on having a cover illustration based on a scene in the story in which the hero discovers an alien space ship that has “parked” itself on Earth, in the ocean just off an island where the hero chances upon it during a fishing outing.

The trick with this artwork was getting everything into the scene, since the island, pyramid, and ocean all lend themselves to a landscape rather than a vertical “portrait” layout. While a wrap-around picture could spread things out, in this case that really wasn’t an option since all the elements needed to be together. So my solution was to place just the edge of an island in the scene, and then have the boat and two scuba divers traveling from the foreground toward the spaceship that is off in the distance from them.

After some playing around with the various elements, I had a “draft” that worked out pretty well:

Charles was happy with this layout, but asked that I add a diving flag on the boat along with a second character, as well as modifying the clothing of the figure and putting in some waves breaking over the base of the island.

As I worked on these changes, I also opted to shift the ocean near the island toward the green end of the spectrum so the island/ocean were more unified in their appearance. The spaceship had a laser array in it upper section, so after consulting with the author, I created some light flares at the top of the pyramid to hint that the structure was more than just some strange building sitting in the ocean.

This led to the final version of the cover art:

After I sent the print resolution version of the picture to Charles, he added his own lettering to the cover and had the illustration for his new novel.

It’s a great tale and anyone who enjoys science fiction, or even just a good tale, should check it out. Here’s a blurb about the book:

The new HG Rickover Shipyard in the asteroid belt was designed to build humanity’s first interstellar colonization ships. Construction of the Voyager III was just underway when the visitors first appeared in the constellation Orion, approaching the solar system from the galactic rim.

What humanity didn’t know was that they were about to take center stage in a multi-billion year conflict between two races that originated in the Andromeda Galaxy and had now poured over into the Milky Way.

Sted Richardson had been pushing hard to lead that first interstellar mission, but his plans were cut short by a freak accident at Tranquility Base on Luna. With the loss of both legs above the knees, he was no longer eligible to lead that mission. His new prosthetic legs, however, gave him hope. His advances in a new career as captain of a state of the art mining assay ship were about to lead him into the forefront of humanity’s battle for its very existence.

You can learn more about this science fiction adventure at TheNuTrilogy.com.

======================

Duncan Long is a professional illustrator who loves creating artwork for science fiction and fantasy stories. You can see more of his artwork at Duncan Long’s Novel and Magazine Illustrations.