Polish Cover for Revival

UPDATE:
You can see all the rough sketches I did for this project over at Lilja’s Library here.

This is the cover art for the Polish edition of Stephen King’s latest novel, Revival, which will be out later this year.

I actually ended up doing two completely different images for this cover.  When doing the covers of King’s new novels for Prószyński, they have to keep the manuscript under wraps and they are not able to send me the book to read in advance.  Instead they send me a synopsis and a list of recurring motifs and possible imagery that may be suitable for the cover art, for me to work from.  So I have to very much rely on the editor’s guidance when coming up with ideas for the cover.  For this book, out of the things they originally suggested, I thought the image of the minister character with lightning in the background, could make for a good cover image.  The editor agreed and my roughs for this idea were approved and I went ahead with the final art.  The publisher approved the finished image but when they sent it to King’s agent for approval, unfortunately he had a problem with using the minister on the cover – one of his reasons being that he thought it might be misleading in how it represents this character, which evolves through the story.  Although the publisher disagreed with this judgement we had to come up with another image for the cover.

The editor next suggested doing something which was more of a landscape piece (that would still be dark and atmospheric) rather than something character focused.  At first she suggested having a church as the central focal point in the landscape.  However, after doing the sketch the publisher had another meeting and the sales department rejected the ‘church idea’ as they thought it may be problematic in their Catholic country.  So the editor came back with another suggestion of depicting the iron pole on top of a granite outcrop, being struck by lightning, which appears in the novel.  There was some discussion as to whether we should have just the pole itself, or add a small shadowy figure with arms raised next to the pole as well, or even, having the figure but no pole.  I created the image with both the pole and figure but also prepared a version with only the pole for them to send to the agent for approval.  Luckily this time the agent approved the version with both the pole and figure straight away.

Here’s the original image I created of the minister.

And here’s a couple of earlier alternative versions of this image I’d also tried before we changed direction completely.