ART – The Making of a Time Travel Anthology Cover

I put my painting practice on hold this week to create a cover for a time travel anthology, Creative Alchemy Inc. will be publishing in a few months.

The book is called Masters of Time: A Sci-Fi and Fantansy Time Travel Anthology.

I spoke about the cover with my wife, who’s editing the book and also contributed to the collection of stories.  We both agreed we wanted a retro Science Fiction feel to the cover.  Something graphic simple.

I’m not a fan of photo covers.  I much prefer drawn or painted ones.  Also, there’s so many photo covers out there that a cover with artwork tends to stand out more.

My wife showed me a photo she thought had the feel she wanted and I went off from there. She wanted all the characters in the anthology to be represented in the cover.

The first thing I did was to sketch out a rough, to show her the direction I wanted to go.  Here it is below:

The intent was to show things in the cover that would immediately evoke the theme of the anthology at a glance. I thought it would be good to use time travel cliches and tropes to get this across. I decided to go with the characters coming out of a “time vortex,” in silhouette and I added clocks so you’d know it wasn’t just a portal.

She liked the concept, so I moved on to make the final cover. Unfortunately,  I didn’t record the process. It took about a week.

I used a lot of reference photos to get a real world idea of what I was going to abstract.  Then I began the tedious work of constructing the assets for the cover.

It was less like drawing and more like cutting out lots of different shapes out of colored paper and gluing it together.

Even though I’m still not sure about the fonts, the final art for the cover turned out like this:

Personally I think it turned out okay.

What do you think? Did I accomplish what I set out to do?