The Last Winter Moon Cover Reveal

Huzzah! The cover art for the last book in the Cycle of the Six Moons trilogy, The Last Winter Moon! Like with the first two books, the cover artist is Brandon Lacey, one of the conceptual artists for Fiona Frightening and the Wicked Wardrobe. Check out more of Brandon’s artwork here! blue-paint-sea.deviantart.com

Like with An Eclipsing Autumn’s cover art, this scene does take place in the third book, from Chapter Thirteen: Beasts of the Mountain. Michelle and her friends emerge from a cave onto a snowy cliff, where they are ambushed by Taesmal beasts and their riders.

For this one, I made a costume design sheet with to-scale height comparisons 😀

Ssshhh, Gediyon grows some facial hair…for a little bit. Also, Dre is actually shorter than Jayse, but she usually wears ridiculous heels so she LOOKS taller most of the time.

Anyway, here’s my mock-up for the cover art 😀

I’d like to think that it’s the best mock-up I had made for all three book covers 😉

And here’s Brandon’s first WIP.

I asked him if he was going to make some of the background mountains curvy, then he should make more of them curvy, and the flourish beneath “Winter Moon” was too thick. I also wanted him to add a second moon to the sky.

Here, the Taesmal mutants are–wow–way too big. The flying lizard at the top looked too much like a dragon, so I asked him to take the horns off.

Also, I hated Gediyon’s stance. He looks way too startled. Dreana’s hand didn’t look robotic enough.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the dark snowflakes, so Brandon fixed that. Still not a huge fan of Gediyon’s stance, either.

It was also probably around this time that I started to give him some trouble about the layout of the background, so I made him a map.

The scene is supposed to take place on a sea-side cliff near a lighthouse, facing north, and the slope rises up into the mountains. I wanted to show off the caved-in…uh, cave entrance to the right of the scene, buuut Brandon reasoned that for aesthetic’s sake, and to simply a cover without having too much going on, he’d rather go with his own vision.

So I was like, okay, okay. Fill in the snow on the trees and try to add more contrast to the mutants ’cause they’re overpowering each other.

Hurray white snow flakes and bliden blossom petals! I wanted Dreana’s hair to be flowing in the wind, and the area in front of her to be clear to show off their silhouettes some more.

Just some more minor touches on filling out the background…

And voila!

And for funsies, here’s another version of the scene that I’m going to use for my Facebook profile picture. They’re in slightly different poses, because some things are harder to convey in silhouettes 😛

Unlike the first two books, I didn’t make an original cover art design, but I did make a mock-up with the look and feel that I wanted for the third book. Here it is!