Take a Sneak Peek at My Cover Art!

I commissioned some artwork from Ina Wong on DeviantArt for the cover of my Young Adult Urban Fantasy novel, ‘Still Water’. You can find her here on DeviantArt, and her work is AMAZING.

I gave her a basic description of the main character, indicated she would need to be muscled like a swimmer, and let her know it was set in Autumn in Wisconsin. I explained it would be a book cover, so I needed space on the top and bottom for text.

This went in stages, so I’ll show you the various in progress pieces.

First, there were two possible sketches.

This one:

And this one:

I chose the second one. The first looked to ‘sexy’ for me, and the main character is only 16. She asked if she could have one of her new artists do the rough up, and I said that was fine.

They explored the idea with this rough:

At which point Ina Wong took over and decided to take it in a different direction:

I thought it was a good idea and sent her information on the area the book was written in, near where I live.

Then she had this:

Which looked great if a bit drab.

So I didn’t hear from her for about a month, but then she came back with this gorgeous piece of artwork:

I pointed out that the mountains in Wisconsin are ancient and small, so she removed them from the far background, but this is basically the final.

It’s so striking!

I LOVE my new cover, and I’m sure it will light a fire under me to work on revisions.

What do you think?