The really great thing about illustrating book or magazine covers for an F+SF magazine is that there’s often no one best way to do it. Plus, I’ve found that I can conflate a few elements from the story (a novella that is the main part of the volume) and it will still hang together as a cover. Typical for cover stuff, I think.
Sketches are typically 7” wide or tall. I like to work small at first so that I can really see how the design is developing and to make sure I get all of the text and title elements placed correctly.
The color study for the final work was made quickly. I liked the way the perylene black was working with the Alizarin crimson, but it was a bit too warm.
The image above is the one that was used for “Wormwood is Not a Star” by Andy Stewart for the 2012 June/July volume of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. But wait! even though I was given the go-ahead for the “Rusalka” cover, I completed this alternative cover too because I was certain that if the publisher saw this idea completed, he’d go bananas for it instead:
Fallout, 18” x 24”, oil on board, 2012.
The story really intrigued me. It was set in the Russian city of Pripryat which was abandoned after Chernobyl melted down and as radioactive particles drifted eastward. Photos of that day showed people fled the city mid-meal, mid-school, mid-work, etc. The abandoned Ferris wheel really got me. The story’s protagonists are a group of townspeople who were unaffected by the radiation because the teenagers were inadvertently creating a forcefield around the city with their superpowers of merely existing. Though as they wearied of the task and their isolation, they grew depressed and created a suicide pact. As they succumbed to their shared fate, the shield started decaying. The state official tasked with finding out why there were so many deaths of teens in the town, was also concurrently having strange dreams of the Rusalka~ spirit-demons that drown unsuspecting people near the river shoreline.
The drawing idea for Fallout was super-spare.
Alas, the publisher did not go with the Fallout painting but with Rusalka!
The Chernobyl reactor disaster happened in 1986 when I was 18 years old. The story really resonated with me because I remember the event and my life at the time rather clearly. On top of that, when I was very young I lived just a few miles away from Three Mile Island when the reactor there nearly melted down in 1979. The author’s writing tone really captures the seriousness of such an event and the emotional effects it has on the people who live there.
What are your thoughts about this work? I hope the covers make you want to go and read the story in the archives of M F+SF— or at least want to drop a comment to to tell me what your experience was.