Cover Art for The Darval-Mers Dossier

 

Above is the original cover art that I painted for my up-coming mystery novel, The Darval-Mers Dossier. As a painting, it is not very good. However, it was painted as a "commercial" work, i.e. for the cover of my book. As such it had to have certain characteristics, like the main action on the left half of the painting, and representing an actual scene to be found in the book. So, despite it being a very so-so painting, it looked to be good enough to use, with modifications "in post" as they say in the movie business, so I moved ahead to use it.

For the proposed cover I had two scenes from the story in mind. The one above, and a landscape scene; a twisting road lining a steep bluff with some motorcars and the sea far below and in the distance - inspired by some scenes from the movie "To Catch a Thief", i.e. the Italian Riviera or some similar place. However, I couldn't quite get the angles of this landscape scene right in my head, not being able to build a complete picture in my mind, and so I started with the train station scene from the story, since I've painted a fair number of similar train station paintings before. Like the one below.

Oh, how I wish they used steam engines in Lorria, but alas, no steam, no smoke. I had to work with what I had written. However, as I said, I knew that I could adjust what I had in post, and hopefully make it work. The first thing I did was add the "cartoon" effects that give each paintbrush stroke a little shadow. It serves to sharpen up the painting. Below is the painting with that effect added.

The effect was subtle, but I didn't want to make it too overpowering. I just wanted to sharpen the edges a bit. The next step was to fit it into the cover. I didn't need the whole painting, so I could resize it or move it about to fit what I needed. I also knew that I would have a title box on the cover and to a lesser degree, a blurb box on the back cover to consider. I made the image bigger than what I needed for the cover to give me the freedom to frame the painting to fit the cover. Below is the current result. I can still move it about or resize it, but all in all, I'm happy with the way it turned out. So this should be pretty close, if not exactly the cover of the paperback version of The Darval-Mers Dossier.

The release date is not set yet, but I expect to have all the work in hand for an early June 2025 release. Stay tuned for more details!