Legend of Draconite Cover Art: E'lsra

This is the third installment of The Legend of Draconite cover art series.

E'lsra

For all my wonderful readers, I'm happy to reveal the Amazon edition cover art for Book 3 of The Legend of Draconite: E'lsra!

When I was first writing The Legend of Draconite during High School, I didn't really know where the series was going until Book 5, the last book in the series. I think the same goes for the first edition cover art, haha. It's been an adventure trying to tie all the books together into an overarcing plot in the revision.

The first edition cover features Tasaru on the left and Rune's lusty motivation for inconveniencing everyone on the right, bearing the Wyvern's wings. I wish I still had all the .xcfs (GIMP files) for these old covers. The solid colors took so much layering. I also took clouds out of a photograph and pasted them in the background because why not?

The second edition features Gage Mon, Draconite of Speed, running through the Tyrellan woods. Like all the 2nd edition covers, the BG is a photograph I took. This photograph I actually took during the day, and then modified the coloring on it so it looked like it was dusky.

The sad thing about these second edition covers is I don't have the original pocket-book size pictures anymore, and so if I tried to enlarge them too much, they lose quality. I think at one point during the super-revision of Sunstone I considered reusing these covers, but with lack of quality and no .xcf files left for them, I needed to start over.

Now we have the Amazon cover! This features Gage too with his sword Silence and the Gift machine Dragonhart on his chest. I mentioned in the previous installment that I had based the armor of the Draconites in these new covers off the 2nd edition covers; I didn't do that for this one. Didn't think to. However, I think this most recent edition is a more fitting representation of what kind of armor Gage would wear: sleek, tight-fitting, helping him run faster.

The background represents Loran runes, as this story deals more with the Loran Rutia, or magicked stone griffins of Tyrell.

Thanks for joining me on this cover art post. Keep an eye out for future installments!

Legend of Draconite Cover Art: Gift Search

This is the second installment of the Legend of Draconite cover art series.

Gift Search

Ah, my plot-hole baby. There's something exciting about the second book of a series. There's more expositions to look forward to, more of the world to explore, and more adventures to discover.

Let's jump into it. The first edition of Gift Search features the Gift machines Theras (top) and Dragonhart (middle), which play a major part in the story. The designs on these machines have changed in my art over time, although Theras doesn't look much different. Unfortunately Theras ended up looking like some sort of mutated, robotic caterpillar on this cover. The "theme," which I explained in the first installment of this series, is actually of Gage, the central Molouk figure in the story. The silvery flames around the cover were a bad design choice on my part, as you can barely see the book title on the bottom. Oh the blunders of self-doing-everything-myself-publishing.

For the COL edition, I featured the Draconite warrior Demos. Something that was fun about the COL editions was detailing the Draconites' armor. I actually sketched out the COL edition characters, scanned them in, and did all the coloring over the pencil. The background is a photograph of mountains I took from my high school bleachers one stormy morning, and represent the mountains around the city of Mal'ur in the story.

Demos carried over into the Amazon edition of Gift Search. For the background I was trying to replicate Polynesian art. The characters once more spend a majority of the story on the island of Zanoll, which has some Polynesian influence when it comes to art. The coloring was kept minimal, highlighting Demos's Gift machine, Phobos, and the two extra arms he provides to Demos. As a mom I sometimes wish I had four arms...

Fun fact: for the inked characters on the Amazon covers, I referred to the COL edition cover artwork to make the armor accurate and as consistent as possible on the Draconite characters, with the exception of E'lsra, which you'll learn more about in the next installment.

The last picture is actually the back cover art for the first edition of Gift Search. The first editions of the series had sepia back covers; Sunstone didn't have any art as I recall. I don't have any images for the back covers of the COL editions, and I struggle to remember how I designed them; I think I may have just flipped the red border along the spine onto the back. The Amazon editions don't have artwork on the back, just the summary.

Thanks for joining me on this cover art installment, and keep an eye out for the cover art of E'lsra, along with the reveal of the new cover art for the Amazon edition!

Book Chapter Updates

I've added some new content to the left column of the Xenithar's Lair blog, that of short happenings in chapters of E'lsra and Incarnate Key, the two manuscripts I'm currently working on. It's my way to share what I've written so far without being spoilerific! Yay!

Legend of Draconite Cover Art: Sunstone

Over the next few weeks I'll be making some special posts on the cover art of The Legend of Draconite series!

Sunstone

Let's go back to 2005, when I was fresh meat -- I mean, a freshman in Jr. High/High School starting my first job at the tender age of 14. I was working with my awesome cousin, who is also an author, and I was inspired by her work in epic fantasy to start a series of my own. I had finished writing my woeful Kajt Chronicles, the sequel series to another series, the Silver Dragon Legacy. It was time to start anew!

There were so many inspirations that went into Sunstone, from my aforementioned cousin's stories to Digimon to randomly stumbling across the word "draconite" on the internet. The main protagonists of The Legend of Draconite series, the Draconite warriors, are named after the dragon-stones they attach to their helmets, and so the first cover art featured an engraved draconite.

For some reason the original carving of the Molouk didn't have a mane. When I started writing Sunstone, I had this book on dinosaurs floating around in my bedroom, and I thought the raptors were the coolest thing; to this day they're my favorite dinosaurs, specifically the Utahraptor, the largest raptor breed. I based the Molouk race off of them, making them more anthropomorphic and altering little details like their skin, mane, adding ears, etc. Maybe I thought to add the Molouk mane in the story after doing the picture. Maybe it's a style preference on the Draconites' part. Maybe I'm just crazy.

The first cover featured in the line-up never made it to publication. I did this to several novels I wrote on the computer, some of which may never see the light of day. The second cover, however, did. You'll notice that there is also a miniature picture, what I called the "theme" of the series title, above the main illustration. I got the idea from the Final Fantasy titles; I even used a FF font, which I'm pretty sure now wasn't legal to use on a product I was selling.... I talked a bit more about the "theme" pictures on my old blog, and I may post them somewhere in this cover series.

The third cover I created after the publication of Founders, and the way you can tell that is it has the Chronicles of Libera logo on it. I had decided during the creation of Founders that I needed an over-arcing series title for the various stories in this world, similar to Forgotten Realms. As you'll see in the next installations of this series, the COL editions all shared the same art style, which I was really happy about, as the first editions didn't really have an art style to tie them together. The picture in the background I took out in Skull Valley, Utah, and I thought it would be a fitting representation of part of Zanoll, where Tasaru spends a majority of her time in Sunstone.

The last cover is the latest edition, created for Sunstone's first publication in a 6x9 novel format on Amazon Createspace. This picture, and the other pictures for the Amazon editions, I inked by hand and scanned in. I kept coloring minimal and stream-lined the font and design; this made it a lot easier to create the following 4 front covers. The swirly tendril things in the background are very much abstract; as the covers progress, I did put a little more thought into them 😥

Thank-you for reading this installation of the LOD cover series, and keep an eye out for the post on the covers for Gift Search!