The Gunslinger/The Dark Tower Series

For years now I’ve been doing covers for the Polish editions of a number of Stephen King books for Prószyński i S-ka.  Recently, another Polish publisher, Albatros, asked me to design covers for new editions of their The Dark Tower series.  Although I’ve worked on a lot of Stephen King books, I’ve never illustrated any from his Dark Tower series so it’s very cool to finally get the chance to work on these!

The publisher wanted me to come up with something different to the previous US and Polish covers for these books, and also wanted a slightly different flavour to the other Polish Stephen King covers I’ve been doing.  For a lot of my King covers for Prószyński i S-ka, I used a limited colour palette with one overall colour, so one way I decided to set this series of covers apart  would be to use two predominant contrasting colours for each cover; one colour for the background and another for the central image.  To give this series it’s own distinct feel, I also suggested that the design could be made to look similar to a tarot card design, as tarot cards feature in the story, and I created a ‘tarot design’ border for them to use for each book.

So here’s the cover for The Dark Tower I, The Gunslinger, which introduces us to the main protagonist Roland, the gunslinger, and his quest for the Dark Tower.  As this is the start of the gunslinger’s search for the Dark Tower, I wanted the positioning of the guns to very subtly bring to mind the shape of a tower.

I’ve just turned in the cover for book two of the series and will be working on the third cover soon so there’ll be more to follow shortly!