First Glimpse
… Cover art for ‘The Lucius Chronicles’…
Hi Everyone! I wanted to share with you, the first sneak preview of the cover artwork for my latest book, ‘The Lucius Chronicles’. This is only a rough mock-up of the proposed cover, but I liked it so much that I couldn’t wait until the finished version was available to share it with you.
‘The Lucius Chronicles’ is a compilation of the three books that comprise the DATS Trilogy: ‘Death and the Schoolboy’, ‘Death and the Atom Bomb’ and ‘Death and the End’, which tell the story of Johnny the schoolboy and his adventures with Eddie, the Death of Children, as they battle the supremely evil Uncle Lucius, the original Death and eponymous villain of the book.
First glimpse of the draft cover for ‘The Lucius Chronicles’.
All of the books are currently available separately on Amazon and Smashwords, but I’ve wanted to bring them together in one place for a long time now, to give readers a more meaty experience and to allow them to devour all of the stories in one go. Hopefully, ‘The Lucius Chronicles’ will be out as an ebook just in time for Christmas and all going well, will also be released in paperback format in 2019. Pre-orders will, as always, be discounted, so watch this space for more details and get your orders in fast!
Anyway, back to the cover. The artwork, which I hope you’ll agree is amazing, was done by American author and illustrator, James Stevens, who has a book of his own entitled, ‘Fern Majestic and The Fall of a Dragon’, coming out in a couple of months’ time. You can find out more by clicking here. He’s on Twitter as well (@FernMajestic) and is a really nice guy, so feel free to look him up, follow him and drop him a line.
The original cover sketch.
It’s only been a couple of weeks since I first approached James about doing the cover for ‘The Lucius Chronicles’ and based on the results so far, I’m really glad that I did. I’d seen some of his art on Twitter and was really impressed by his style. When he agreed to give it a go, he read the entire DATS Trilogy in two days flat and fired up with bags of inspiration, quickly came up with an initial concept sketch that pretty much became the final version. In fact, the only thing that we ended up changing were the characters in the foreground, just to make Johnny and Eddie a little younger and that was only because I was being pedantic!
The revised cover sketch.
With a bit of luck, in a week or so’s time, I’ll be able to share the final draft of the cover for ‘The Lucius Chronicles’ before it goes to the graphic designer for finishing. I can’t wait to see what the final imagery looks like and I hope that you’ll be impressed too.
Oh, and one last thing. When finished, ‘The Lucius Chronicles’ will also contain a selection of line drawings depicting various scenes from the three books, done by my good friend and excellent cartoonist, Eugene Georgiades. I will share some of them with you a bit nearer the time, but for now, you’re just going have to make do with James’ fantastic cover art. Enjoy!
