Last year I had the utmost pleasure to create the covers for a brilliant trilogy by the divine Celine Kiernan. You can tell I’m happy about that! It was a big undertaking and it was my decision to go all-out in their design and style to really shoot for something memorable that would also engage with the books as completely as possible. I also got to use my favourite style for the first time on a cover – very rewarding.

Well the books have gone into heaps of countries, they have been winning acclaim left, right and centre, and while different covers abound, mine have received a fantastic response. Most recntly from the SFSignal blog. Here are a couple of the comments (joy!)…

“I love these covers so hard.  If I had the shelf-space I would display them all face-out on my bookshelves.  I’m entranced by the layers of perspective – I feel like I could stick my arm into each one and it would go for miles.”

AND WHAT’S MORE…

The 59th Annual Australian Publishing Association Book Design Awards 2011 judging is complete, and the shortlist results are in.

AND…

Best Designed Children’s Cover of the Year
Crowded Shadows: The Moorehawke Trilogy Vol II – cover by Bruno Herfst, illustrations by Elise Hurst

The Best Designed Children’s Series
Crowded Shadows: The Moorehawke Trilogy Vol II – cover by Bruno Herfst, illustrations by Elise Hurst

The winners will be announced on Thursday, 19 May.

Wooohooo!!!

]]> http://www.elisehurst.com/journal/2011/02/the-moorehawke-covers-live-on/feed/ 1 http://www.elisehurst.com/journal/2011/01/mondoodle-24-01-2011/ http://www.elisehurst.com/journal/2011/01/mondoodle-24-01-2011/#comments Mon, 24 Jan 2011 11:13:19 +0000 elise http://www.elisehurst.com/journal/?p=2049 My hands weren’t up to drawing today but it doesn’t matter because I received something very exciting to share! The Russians are releasing the Moorehawke Trilogy by Celine Kiernan and they’re using my covers. Woohoo!

And here’s the first one! I LOVE it.

I’ve always found it very exciting to see any of my work appearing on a translated work. It’s just so damn exotic and cool. And did I mention that I LOVE it?

On the weekend I was in Sydney for an ASA meeting and I arrived with a little time to spare. So I wandered along the street until I came to the Hill of Content bookshop (in Balmain) where, to my delight, I found these…

They are the Nutshell Library by Maurice Sendak (published by Harper Collins) comprising of: One Was Johhny a counting book, Alligators All Around an alphabet, Chicken Soup with Rice a book of months, and Pierre a cautionary tale in five chapters and a prologue. I just realised I’ll have to photograph them with something to show the size. Haha – you just can’t tell they’re so titchy… about 10 cm high I think.

But there’s more!! I just found out about these on the Orbit blog… they are beautiful, tiny complete versions of the Moorehawke series and those black and white ones… are my covers. They were put together by an artist called Nyukaa and they look magnificent!

Forgive me for including some quotes here but I was just bursting with pride! It’s a great article. Celine’s books have gone all round the world and there are 6 different covers for the trilogy, which really means 24 different covers… the article asks here about them all.

Celine: I think of all my covers, the ones that hit the mark in all three respects (story, tone and characters) are the Australian ones. They are quite simply stunning. Australian fans often take time to praise the cover art to me, this is, I suspect, very rare.

…

It’s not immediately obvious but there are many subtle details on the AUS covers which reflect aspects of the story ( my favorite of these being the ravens that flow from cover to cover; the way Wynter is still wear Christopher’s jacket on cover three, and most especially, the way she is carrying Razi’s falchion sword: this is such a subtle and lovely symbol of a moment in book three where Wyn takes up Razi’s burden when he can go no further.) Another huge reason for my love of these covers is the inclusion of Razi – it can’t have been easy to come up with a design that included all three major characters, so many story elements, and such a strong sense of drama without cluttering the page. Lovely.

The full article is here. I am so happy that the experience for Celine was positive and that we were able to be in such close contact. It makes a big difference to be able to ask the author all those questions – I know I’d appreciate someone asking me.

And then there’s this one which is a great article about fantasy cover art – the good the bad and the ugly! I love the graph of clichéd elements of cover art – from unicorns to swords and “the completely dark cover of meaninglessness”. Mine fall under the heading (and she blushes) of “Really Awesome Cover Art In Fantasy” which, they are happy to note, also seem to sell the books.

My favourite response of all though is a reader who bought the book overseas then, on seeing the Australian covers, had to buy it again That’s more than I could have hoped for!

So to summarise some 2009 things…

The online shop was brilliant – hordes of visitors and all in all a nice smooth system. Let me know any feedback please! Thanks for all the support and thanks to Peter for making it all run so brilliantly.

The exhibition dates were set for May 2010. It makes a huge difference to have an opening night to work toward now.

On an activist note, the campaign to stop the canning of the Parallel Importation restrictions was a success, thank goodness. There was a lot of weird press that went around last year relating to all of this. When this arises again, I can only hope that all of us will be involved in the process to come up with a good strategy and some clear aims this time – politicians, creators, publishers, book sellers, agents and societies, all. For now, with the digital book about to become a major player and change the book landscape in the next 5 years anyway, we have bigger fish to fry! How do we keep publishing alive, keep printing the glossy stuff we love, satisfy the need for low-price digital books and make sure that the people creating this stuff can still afford to do so? It’s going to be very interesting.

These arrived in December – the second glorious book in the Moorehawke trilogy by Celine Kiernan. And, joy of joys, the covers match up as they should! They’re also starting to get some attention, the first one being voted one of the top 5 covers of the year on this great blog. Yay! So here’s book one, and 2 of book two… because you could line up book two over and over for a long forest, if ever you should need one…

There was also gingerbread. Much much gingerbread, made by Peter and iced by me (mainly) for all our friends and family with kids. Sorry to those of you without kids. No gingerbread for you. And then as an antidote to all the cheerful houses we made, here are the gingerbread ZOMBIES. The trick is to make good use of the change-over time when the white icing is combining with the red icing in the icing syringe… it looks just like intestines.

And I have greened the studio a little with a yukka and random tubes of bamboo.

We are all getting along just fine.

I’m allowed to show you the final Moorehawke covers now! Written by the wondrous Celine Kiernan and published here by Allen & Unwin – I can’t wait to see them in-store! Here are each of the individual covers and the collated image below.

I’ve heard that they’re developing some great posters for the shops.

As you may know, they were done as one single illustration and they should all match up when laid side by side. I’m so pleased that they are being published in black and white without wanting tinting. It’s a much stronger set of covers this way. Thanks A&U! Click the below images for big versions…

And as an extra complication I made it so the centre image could tile. Just for fun…

* Having three dramatic phases of picture – usually there is one focal point and the rest organises itself around that to complement and accent it. This had to work as three flowing interconnected pieces – while having all the necessary drama of three individual and equally important ones.

* Doing four overlapping trees. I decided that the middle scene, being a forest, could be made to tile if multiple copies of the same book were placed side by side. So there is a half-tree on each edge – and these halves need to make a whole when joined. They also need to continue into the following and preceding pictures, and become the trees that compliment those very different scenes. So two trees became four and photocopied slices of the middle halves allowed me to make the lines match up. If that makes sense. Also there is a horse running onto one edge and off the next which are meant to match up too… For just one second of lunacy I wondered if they might be made to tile vertically but then the devil returned my brain and I decided against it.

* Doing very light, slight shading with a pen. Especially small subtle things like distant faces.

* Making myself continue the picture into the bleed. This is where you extend the picture beyond the area that is going to be used in case the printing is slightly off-centre. This way you don’t get a white edge suddenly showing up. When the technique is very labour-intensive it’s a rotten thing to do. Especially when you end up doing something rather good that may never be seen! There’s a delightful little bit of cloud and some rather racy twigs (if I do say so myself!) that will never see the light of day.

Clever things I worked out:

* To make some flaps of paper to cover up the bleed area. One of my faults is that I can’t help but fill all available space. Every time. It doesn’t matter if I’m only meant to do a little illustration – if there’s lots of paper around it I can’t help but make the picture use it. This means that I often mess up my design and don’t have as much space as I’d like around things. By making extra flaps I could trick myself and restrict the drawing to the area I actually wanted to use, and then I could move the flaps aside to draw into the bleed. You can’t always change your habits – but you can sometimes fool yourself for the right result.

* For subtle fine lines and minuscule detail – use black watercolour and the finest of fine brushes (just a couple of hairs) to do controlled light strokes. They look the same as pen but avoid the terror of not knowing when the pen’s ink would suddenly engage properly with the paper and do a bold and utterly incorrect line.

* That there is no substitute for a detailed rough when there’s no room for error on the final piece. Sometimes you just don’t know something won’t work until it’s on the paper.

* A fresh eye is worth its weight in gold. What a disturbing metaphor. The fresh eye was Erica Wagner’s of Allen & Unwin who spotted where things needed a little more and hey presto, the next day I had added, tightened, softened and it felt properly complete. Thanks be to Elise Jones editor-extraordinaire, Bruno Herfst font-genius, and to the author Celine Kiernan who answered all my questions about armour, tack, handedness and a hundred other things. It must have been hard to not see what I was doing to her book – especially as she is an artist herself and would have very strong images in her head already. Oh, I hope she likes it! I think the first cover is sitting in her inbox awaiting for her return from Cork on Monday.