New cover illustrations

Here's the new cover illustrations for The Horsepower Whisperer. As with any picture on this blog or the one known as Engine Punk if you click on the image you'll see a large image. I was happy enough with the earlier cover design for some time but as soon as I'd revamped my website it looked a little staid. I realized I could do better and ever since then my publishing adventure has been on hold while I embarked on a remembering-how-to-paint trip. I donned blinkers and stopped doing many of the other things I enjoy like writing and welding in my determination to add as much pizzazz as I could to my covers.

It became an obsession and I entered that dark tunnel where you strive for perfection knowing that it is really an impossible dream. I never really know what keeps me going during these times for there are no travelling companions but at last I have emerged, blinking in the sunlight, reconciled to the lack of perfection but reasonably happy with the result.

It’s been a trip down memory lane, too. The last time I’d used gouache or water colour was a t school. In fits and starts, I stumbled across the techniques I’d left behind nearly 30 years ago.

In the process of producing this picture for The Wormton Lamb, my whole house has become my studio. It looks a mess with materials, papers, PCs, scanners, printers, motorcycle exhaust awaiting fitment and piles of books everywhere. But really it’s a creative flux. All this jumbled up stuff has been doing my suede in for weeks but the juxtaposition of unrelated elements – like BMW zorsts and old ammunition boxes full of marker pens – sets my ideas off, like sprinting mad March hares. I have experienced a creativity explosion that is not over yet. I was determined not to stop until the illustrations for both books were finished.


I am now close to having a tidy up. The explosion has create a lot of fall out.

And fluff, too. Where does it all come from?

The next stage in this adventure will be to experiment with different layouts. Here's one I mugged up quickly using the old cover illustration for the The Horsepower Whisperer. I still have other ideas to try out but this one seems to work for me. One thing with which I've struggled is how the text and pictures fit together. The titles are different sizes and the visual focus or action is always in a different place. It's very easy to enter an endless loop of adjusting and re-adjusting elements. What colour should the stripes be? Should the text be black or a matching or complimentary colour?

But for now I've reached the "Sod it" stage. It's over the Beck at Red Snapper for her professional input.