Dangerous Visions

Here’s my cover art for the latest edition of Dangerous Visions from Orion Books.  Dangerous Visions, which was edited by Harlan Ellison, is one of the most influential science fiction anthologies and was first published in 1967.  This new edition is part of the current Gollancz SF Masterworks series and should be out in February next year.

The brief was quite an open one.  The editor thought that for a book of this nature the cover image almost has to be abstract or unusual in nature.  As a starting point they suggested a big thick book bound with chains with words and sentences fighting free, a montage of fantastic images or a series of eyeballs with dangerous events reflected in them.  They were also happy for me to suggest ideas so I came up with a couple of ideas using their initial suggestions as a starting point:  one idea was to have various imagery relating to dangerous events/science/SF collaged within the iris and pupil of a close-up of an eye and the other was to have these same images displayed on the screens of stacks of retro style TVs (reflecting the fact that this anthology was original published in the 60s).  They really liked the TV idea as it was different to any of the other covers they already had in the series so that’s the one we went for.

Another major consideration when creating the artwork was the colour scheme.  For the current series all the images have been treated to make them very bright and modern, so I kept this in mind and used a limited colour palette that would compliment the existing covers in the series and that would be easy for the designer to adjust as a whole or in part to make it fit in with the rest of the series.