The Starriest Summer Cover Reveal!

Da da da daaa!!

Here is the super fabulous cover for The Cycle of the Six Moons:  The Starriest Summer!  The artist is Brandon Lacey, one of the conceptual artists for Fiona Frightening and the Wicked Wardrobe.  Check out more of Brandon’s work here!  blue-paint-sea.deviantart.com

So here’s a fun behind the scenes look at what went into making the cover.  I contacted Brandon, good ol’ pal that he is, because I wanted a vector, silhouette-style cover that I knew he could do better than I could.  We talked about what I wanted to get out of it, and I sent him a PDF with all of the reference material.

Here’s a sample of the many silhouette book covers I gave him to reference:

I told him that I wanted Michelle and Gediyon on the cover, in the tropical setting of Lereli.  I then included a bunch of sketches that I had made of the place, such as this:

However, I wanted the cover to be blue, not purple as it is when Michelle first arrives.  And for it to be blue, Michelle would have had to have changed into her first costume change (tee hee), which was this super old drawing.I also gave Brandon a kind of embarrassingly crappy mock-up cover……and he provided me with his first sketch!

Then he filled everything and added color 😀 But this one was way too purple, so I asked him to change the colors……To a pleasant aqua blue 🙂

Then there were other minor tweaks, such as the windows looking too European…

Which was changed accordingly!  Then there were the lantern beetles, which in this picture, look more like colorful sparkles.  I wanted them to be more uniform in size, and so…

Brandon fixed that as well 😀

Anyway, it was an insanely fun process, and I can’t wait for Brandon to make covers for the rest of the trilogy 😀  In case you’re curious, here’s the original cover that I had created myself.  This edition was never for sale.  I printed them as gifts and gave them to my friends.  Less than ten exist 😛

I also made a video about the experience 🙂 You can watch it here.  (Please excuse my rather prominent Californian accent 😛 It likes to come out when I don’t have a script.)  You can also see some of the magnetic character bookmarks that I’ll be giving away during my book tour, hosted by YA Bound Book Tours!  The tour will take place from December 14-18.  The e-book is available for preorder here on Amazon.