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!
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