It feels weird to do a cover reveal yet I’ve been showing around a cover for this novella, The Blossoming of the Big Tree, for the last several months, but well, I guess that first one was to test waters, to figure out how to do things, and so now I’ve made the actual cover for the book, I can do a small ceremony here to show it off. I just hope the readers won’t be confused, but well, I kept the spider-bot and the font, and only played around with the background. I like this one better, and I hope you do to.
This novella will be released on 1st July, in about six days, and the e-book is going for only $7 (you can pay more to support me 😀 ). The print book will come about a month later, but it will ship from Uganda, so while I want to price it at around $10, shipping might cost a fortune. Anyway, you can pre-order from the major stores like Kobo, Bookshop.org, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, and Apple, but if you buy direct from us, you’ll get an e-book instantly. It is 99% finished and I might catch the stray typo before the 1st of July, and if I do, I’ll send you the revised copy as well, no worries. So click here to buy from us.
When I made the first cover, I had never done a book’s art before. I had to read a few tutorials, and watched one or two videos, and the thing that bugged me was how to work on a design that will end up in print. I had to worry about the book dimensions, the thickness, the spine, the binding, and all this was strange waters for me, so I did what I always do when I want to learn something new. Work on an actual project. The first version didn’t turn out too badly. (I made another cover after that, for my first ever collection of short stories, A Killing in the Sun, and by then I had gotten the hang of things, which is why I did a cover reveal for that book before I did for this one. It’s will soon be on pre-order.)
For inspiration, I looked at a lot of solarpunk artwork and saw that many had flowers. Or perhaps not many, I actually only looked at A Psalm for the Wild-Built, the sweet book by Becky Chambers, and saw that it had a robot and lots of flowers, and I thought, why not. Go with that theme!
There’s a robot in my book, too, and it looks like a spider, and in many ways it is like the robot in A Psalm for it is sentient. However my main character, an old woman who witnessed her country transform from a ‘third-world underdeveloped shithole’ (no, those words are not in the book, but I put it in quotes because that’s not even close to describing what life around here is like; it’s just that capitalism and colonialism has made us to believe so) into a futuristic solarpunk utopia (and the transformation happens after they shake off that mental slavery and embrace their ancestral knowledge systems), and so this old woman has trauma and doesn’t want to believe what she is seeing, that indeed the spider is a sentient robot made by another woman in a nearby village.
To be honest, the robot in this book is a little more simplistic, design-wise, than what I depicted on the cover, but well, since this is a sci-fi, I had to conjure an image that will sell the idea, and so I went for something more spider-ish, and more robot-looking. I wanted to give it a happy face, because solarpunk is all about happiness and hope, and I think it looks like it is happily playing with a flower – uhm – does it?
The first version of the cover seemed a little dull to me, especially the background being so plain. I made it all green since I was thinking of a very green world, but in this remake, I went with yellow, to represent the sun, you know, and I think yellow is a happier color than green.
I modeled the spider in Blender, and then I used krita to make it look stylized. I tried some painterly plugins in Blender, but it was taking me to long to get the hang of it, and yet krita already has this amazing filter called G’MIC-Qt (what a name!) that makes people like me who can’t paint transform our 3D renders into painterly artworks. Whatever style you want, whether its water color or pencil strokes or something, you get it. And I wanted it to look that way because, again, Becky Chamber’s book has a stylized look, and because, why not? After putting it through krita, I finished in inkscape with the final designs (Someone should make something that could make all these software talk to each other, and so I can make something in blender, take it to krita, and finish in inkscape without rendering…. wishful thinking, I know, but you get the idea?
Anyway, here is the artwork. Sorry for rambling. I just wanted to fill the page with some words.
