Glencrow Summer Alternate Covers

 

This is the cover I eventually settled on

A you may have noticed in my last post on Glencrow Summer's production time line, I painted a number of pictures of the glen of the Crow River. I did so, in part, just to get back into painting. Another reason was, as the story churned in my mind, to put down some locales in paint. Given my non-visual mind, I hoped that perhaps I could make the locale more real to me by the process of painting the place. That said, I can't really say that the paintings ever quite matched the vague impressions of the scenes I had in mind. This is not surprising, since I've found over the years that the impressions I have in mind, have never quite translate into the actual scenes. My impressions are too vague, too undefined to be pinned down with my limited talents. The more practical purpose of painting these scenes was that I was needed to paint the cover I'd need for both the paperback and ebook versions. 

For the cover of a paper book that you want to wrap around to the back cover, most of the important action needs to be on the left half of the painting, which will end up being the front cover. My first effort  for a cover didn't work out at all so I repainted it with something else and then moved on to my next attempt, the painting below.

My first attempt at a cover

The problem I felt with this cover, at least I felt so at the time, was that the people in the distance were too small and remote for a book cover. I thought that what was needed was to have the characters more to the fore. Something less of a landscape painting and more of a book illustration. So I paint over parts of this picture, re-routing the river a bit to bring the two people fishing closer. Below was the result of this effort. I also added some black outline to the painting to sharpen it up a bit.

                       

In addition to this version, I also decided to use the second version of my first attempt at a cover that I mentioned above. As you recall, the original idea didn't work out, so I painted the same locale but from a different angle and called it a day as a mere landscape painting rather than potential cover. This is that re-paint effort below.

My first attempt was paining the scene looking directly at the wall from the meadow.

But then it occurred to me that if I switched things around on this painting, maybe I could use it as a cover, after all. The main problem with using this scene for the cover was that the potential locale for the action of the painting was on the left hand side, and I'd need it on the right for a cover. However, flipping the digital version over to get the road on the right presented no problem in software. So I did it, and then added several figures in the foreground who were getting together for an evening of fishing on the Crow River. I also added a fence line that was described in the text and pushed back the wall of the lodge further into the woods to better fit the book description as well. Both scenes are supposed to be in the mellow evening, so I altered the tone of the paints for a more golden glow.

A second alternative cover

Now, if I was an illustrator, both of these attempts would probably have worked better as covers than the one I eventually chose. But alas, I'm not. I'm just an impressionist landscape painter. I decided that these paintings, with the figures so large looked too clunky, too awkward, too sketchy. Too just bad. So in the end, I decided to just go with a revised version of my first cover, to just settle for mood rather than illustrations of action.

So I went back to my second version, the river scene, and painted over it yet again, restoring it to something like, but hopefully better, than the original. I decided to keep the original painting just a landscape, so I added the figures fishing from the original (digital) version in "post" i.e. I cut them out of the digital version of the original painting and patched them into the new digital version. 

And just to put everything right, I repainted the road scene painting again to eliminate those clunky figures. I did, however, keep the fence line and the wall further back in the woods.

The final version of the road painting

While I did need to come up with a cover, I was mostly just having fun with paint with all these efforts. I]m not convinced that covers matter all that much. At least not in the way we're told, i.e. to have covers "appropriate" for the genre. I see too many different styles for the same genre, and see how cover styles come and go out of style, to worry over much about covers. I simply go for covers that suggest the mood of the story, and play into my long suit, such as it is, with landscapes/street scenes. And I should add, that fit with my "brand".