The Orb of Chalar

The "Orb" is a book that I recently designed the cover for. It is the sequel to another book that I had designed the cover for ("Deathquest to Parallan") by Benjamin Towe. I really liked the first cover. The idea from the author was to have an alien landscape (red ground) and three suns; one huge gray one, one small black one, and one tiny yellow one. This, of course, is hard to do since "sun" to me means a "light-emitting-orb" and it's hard to make a gray sun emit light. Nonetheless it was a fun cover to work on (sci-fi is my favorite genre to design). The sequel was different but meant to look like the same style. The idea was to have a red-headed woman in a purple dress holding an orb of many colors. I couldn't find a red-headed woman holding anything (let alone an orb) so I did what I could and made the orb hover in front of her. That didn't fly so I had to work out a way to make her hold the orb.

I ended up taking an arm from a woman doctor who was pouring some liquid in to her hand and merging it with the previous cover. The only thing I don't like about the final image is that the woman is now looking off in to space rather than at the orb. I should put up images of the entire covers (including the spine, the back cover and the jacket flaps) because I really think everything goes together so well on these covers. I hope Benjamin Towe is as happy with them as I am.