It gives me great pleasure to announce that today, August 28th, my dear friend and colleague Joshua Cutchin is releasing his debut novel, Them Old Ways Never Died, on Amazon (both as paperback and Kindle).
A book whose cover I designed đŸ™‚
I’ll admit it: Through the years I felt a bit miffed over the fact that I hadn’t gotten a chance to make something for Josh’s books yet. But when he told me he had written a fiction novel and he wanted me to design the cover, once I managed to go through the manuscript I knew my wait had been worth it. And I also knew I needed to do a stellar job to honor such a wonderful prose.
The project was very interesting from the start, because even though Josh already had some very specific ideas about what he wanted, he was also very open to suggestions.
Without going through any real spoilers, and before I had even finished reading the whole manuscript —something I not only felt compelled to do to get the hang of the book and see if some fragments could spark my imagination into interesting avenues, but also because I got hooked and needed to find out how the story ended!— Josh had first suggested the cover’s illustration could be based on a very dramatic scene that takes place in a bathroom. Even before I had reached that particular chapter, I began working on it based on a layout Josh had created to help himself maintain consistency within his own narrative.
Using AutoCAD and my old interior design skills, I decided to create a 3d model based on Josh’s floor plan, taking into consideration Josh’s suggestion to keep the bathroom’s small window in the center, due to something very important happening outside.
I did as he asked, but on a Skype reunion I told Josh I didn’t think using that bathroom scene to ‘sell’ his novel might be such a good idea. After seeing the two images I created (shown above) he ended up agreeing with me.
I kept reading the novel in search of interesting ‘scenes’ I could use for the cover, while Josh suggested the idea of a creepy white hand next to a bottle of booze (alcoholism and the subject of addiction play a very important role in the novel). I agreed I would use that concept as an alternative while I also created two more options for his consideration; since I don’t want to spoil anything about the novel to future readers, I’ll refrain from showing those options —even though I feel they are vague enough to not ‘give the plot away’— but in the end, and after consulting with his wife Sarah and other friends and family, he leaned more toward the ‘hand with the bottle’ option, which is the one I ended up developing.
From the get go I knew that I didn’t want to do something too ‘hyper-realistic’ because that’s not really my strong suite. In fact, I was looking for a certain ‘pulpy’ look like the ones shown in cheap novels from the 1960s and 1970s.
Once again, I made use of Clip Studio Paint’s impressive ability to mimic real paint brushes —I went for ‘oil brushes’ instead of the ‘gouache’ type I used in Paul Kimball’s latest commission— doing my best to leave a certain ‘raw’ look to my brush strokes. I know that to attain a real ‘pulpy’ quality, though, I should have been bolder with the artwork by not leaving the elements so well defined —the best pulp artist are the ones which manage to combine ‘lost and found/hard and soft’ edges, which is an art concept meant to divert the attention of the viewer toward the focal interests in a composition.
In the case of my composition, almost all the edges are ‘hard’ and well defined. The ‘softness’ comes I guess from the bottle and the darker values which give only the slightest hint of the reflective quality of the bottle’s crystal, and the liquid it contains.
Nevertheless, I think the illustration covers the goals of (a) generating interest in the would-be reader, and (b) being pleasing to the eye. Josh was very happy with it, and he also requested me to create a ‘fleurette’ type of design which he originally wanted to appear at the top of each new chapter; but Mike Clelland, who designed the interior layout of the book, ended up suggesting we should only use it on the first page of the novel.
I designed this ‘fleurette’ motif based on very specific elements within the story itself, using the inking style I developed for our Tarot project. Again, at the risk of giving away a bit of a spoiler, I’ll only say there is a very good reason I chose to create my little ‘green fox’, which is of course heavily influenced by the ‘green man’ mythology of the British isles.
I’m very happy with how this ‘added bonus’ ended up, and I know Josh had bookmarks printed with it, which he’ll probably give away as a gift to the people who request a signed copy of his book through his email address (foodtaboo@gmail.com). Who knows? Maybe someday he’ll choose to create a lavish leather-bound hardcover edition, in which case perhaps the green fox could be printed in metallic green ink or something. Or maybe we could sell them as postcard-sized prints online?
Anyway, to finish this post I want to share this video interview Greg Taylor and I recorded with Josh, in which he discussed the book as well as many other interesting things. Enjoy!
Oh, and please don’t forget: COMMISSIONS ARE WELCOME!
Absurd by Design 