Cover Reveal: The Shadow of Arcadia

The day has finally arrived. Here is the cover reveal for The Shadow of Arcadia.

What a week it’s been! If you’ve been following my social media, you’ll have seen the daily teasers I’ve been putting up for this cover reveal, and it’s been really amusing seeing your reactions, and overall great fun. I worked hard on this cover, and I don’t mind telling you it was a nightmare putting together. It went through several iterations before I decided on this one, and the painting of it was some of the hardest I’ve ever had to do. The process has really stretched me as an artist and designer, and I feel like my powers have doubled since the last time we met, Count I’ve grown tremendously in both of those areas.

About the Cover Art

In short, the artwork is a digital painting, and as I mentioned above, it went through several iterations. The hardest part of the process was deciding to abandon the bird’s eye view landscape painting of the Arcadia Dorsa region of Mars, which I painted the Christmas before last when I had COVID. I really was wedded to that concept, but I couldn’t make it work as cover art. Instead it’s become part of the catalogue of background and promotional artwork for my books generally.

The next hardest thing was actually painting the spaceplane. I’m not a technical artist, and I’m severely lacking in practice, so it was a huge challenge to design something that didn’t look totally ridiculous when extrapolating from the silhouette on the cover of The Flight of the Aurora. Plus there was the oddity of representing how debris and smoke and all that destruction would behave in space. I knew I needed the spaceplane to be all busted up - not least because it seems to be one of the themes for my book covers - but mainly because it represents a scene from the book itself. The first iteration of the spaceplane was, like the original background painting, a top-down view, and it had copious amounts of fire and smoke trailing out of the back. It wasn’t very accurate, and honestly, when the 20th anniversary of the Columbia disaster rolled around in February, I thought the imagery was in poor taste. So I pondered and pondered for a long time. Then I sketched out a picture of the Aurora over Mars in my sketchbook (which I also shared on Instagram and Twitter, and is available to view in my portfolio) and that provided the inspiration for the wrecked spaceplane on the front cover of the book.

The book’s title typography was a unique challenge. Now three books deep, I’m locked into using Rig Shaded as the primary title face for my books. And I originally wanted to have it in the same layout as From the Grave of the Gods. I soon came to realise the lengths of the words didn’t fit that layout right, and the previous novel’s title was uniquely suited for it. So I came up with something a bit different, but still using Rig Shaded - this time allowing myself to incorporate the light font weights for contrast.

And finally, Mars. Not wanting to reinvent the wheel, I took the vector of the planet that I had made previously - which I had made from scratch using publicly available map data from the planet, had rendered onto a 3D sphere, and then turned into a vector in Adobe Illustrator for higher-res work - and painted over it. This part went by pretty quickly and I’m really pleased with the results. I’m also a bit puffed up about my absolute genius in figuring out how to do it easily.

The Full Wrap & Blurb

It took me a lot less time than I thought it would to come up with the blurb text once I actually sat down to do it. I only went through about five or six different versions, and a lot of editing, before I settled on what you can see in the image. I had to make sure it would fit the template I’d developed from the first novel. But, here it is below for screen-reader accessibility:

SIDERA SILERE:
LET THE STARS
REMAIN SILENT.

Nestled in the shadow of a derelict alien warship, the Martian city of Arcadia Landing shines as a beacon of humanity’s golden future. There, United Nations representatives gather to sign a new international treaty; a stepping-stone towards global unity. But when a dangerous faction born of an unlikely blend of isolationists and alien-worshippers attacks the city, the hope of unity lies scattered among the ruins.

Heartbroken, Captain James Fowler must work together with Nate Rifkin, the rueful captain of the Magellan, to bring those responsible to justice. But a deadly encounter with the cabal’s enigmatic masked leader draws James into a deeper mystery stretching back nearly fifty years.

With the help of Capt. Erin Pritchard, and anachronistic force of nature, Capt. April Rose-Hartley, they investigate the links to James and Angela’s past to uncover the identity of this murderous figurehead, track him down, and put a stop to his grand plans for humanity.

So that’s all for now from the cover reveal. I hope you like it, and I hope it intrigues you to keep an eye out for when I eventually open pre-orders for the book. There’s still a lot of editing work to do to get it as good as it can be, but as always I’ll keep you updated on the journey.