I’ve had some amazing covers for my past novels, but – as publisher with coeur de lion publishing – I’ve also designed some covers myself, most notably for Pyrotechnicon and Anywhere But Earth. For The End Times of Markusz Zielinski, I had a pretty strong concept for what the cover should be, so I decided to see if I could come up with a cover that fully realised that idea.
A key element of the story is the strange appearance of ‘Teel-Attar radiation’ as the only visible remnant of a collapse of spacetime.
Much of the visible sky was missing, replaced with the spectral red blossoms of Teel-Attar radiation. The universe was dying.
So the concept was to have a spacescape being slowly eaten by strange spectral flowers. The easiest way to achieve this would have been to create a prompt in an AI image generation app. But as well as being creatively self-defeating, I would never use generative AI because it’s built on the theft of creative people’s work. AI is good for doing repetitive administrative tasks like scheduling events or working out trip routes. But I agree with Studio Ghibli creator Hayao Miyazaki that generative AI art (or prose for that matter) is, “an insult to life itself“.
So I did it the hard way and had a lot of fun and learned things in the process.
Firstly I chose a background image, which was a starscape but in order to lean into the strangeness of what was happening, I chose a stock image showing a negative picture of black stars in gray space. After that I went out for a walk with my dog, Mack, and took some pictures of flowers I found along the way.
I settled on an image of a hibiscus flower, because it was the right colour. I also picked a couple of flowers (thanks, neighbours!) and separated and photographed the petals. I then removed the backgrounds from all those petal images and opened them in GNU Image Manipulation Program (or GIMP for short) which is a free and open source image editing program a bit like Photoshop. There I took the petals and built new flower images, which I used to create a cover concept.
I liked it, but the image still looked too much like a flower so again in GIMP I used a brush tool to blur the images to look less like flowers and more like radiation. After that it was a matter of layering and placing these radiation flowers and selecting a suitable font for the cover text. I ended up using Anisette Standard as the main font because it has a sort of Deco vibe that I felt matched my main character. I also created a clipping mask from a composite radiation flower image so the words ‘End Times’ would look like they were spelt out in Teel-Attar radiation.
Then I ran through a number of iterations moving and placing images and playing with font placement, size and colour until I hit on a combination I liked. The gallery below shows the process:
You can also view the development of the cover, including a rejected first concept, as a YouTube short:
What if you could save the universe?
Markusz Zielinski is trying, but what with being sacked, imprisoned, freed, kidnapped and threatened with death, no-one’s making it easy for him.
Trapped in the middle of a factional struggle for dominance on the last planet, it’s up to Markusz to save everyone despite themselves. Only problem is, he may be losing his grip on reality.