Mieville & Grossman, glossed; The Making of a Cover

Annotations are fun. Here are some handy collections thereof, featuring…

—–

If you love behind-the-scenes stuff, are weirdly interested in marketing, and/or fixate on cover art decisions for sff novels, check out creative director Lauren Panepinto’s wonderfully in-depth series (13 posts!) on the making of covers for a recent epic fantasy novel trilogy. The series goes all the way from casting of a martial artist as the photographic model, to prop and costume acquisition, to multiple rounds of retouching and graphic design.

So much chewy procedural and decision-making detail in there. It’s also a fun insight into what being creative director for a major sff imprint actually entails – being hyperaware of aesthetic and stylistic trends in current sff media, for example.

Panepinto also shares great advice for commercial sff illustrators over at the Muddy Colors art blog, which is where I first found her Orbit cover series.

Go to:
China Miéville: bio and works reviewed

2 thoughts on “Mieville & Grossman, glossed; The Making of a Cover”

  1. Perhaps this could inspire you to revive your Bad Book Covers feature–that would please me.

    This isn’t relevant to the post, but since you like YA fiction, how about reviewing An Alien Music, a gem from the early 80s.

    1. I greatly appreciate that BBCF is missed, but at the same time that I started to find it tiring to be sarcastic enough to write those, I also realized that Good Show Sir was covering the same territory, and in much greater volume…

      ’80’s YA spaceship drama sounds fun. Thanks for the rec; I’ll see what my reading queue and I can do.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *