Greetings, travelers! We’re a little ways away from when the third Adelia Kreegan book dropped, and strangely, you’re not going to see the efforts that went into making that cover work just quite yet. That’s because we actually had the cover of the Ancestral Magic trilogy done first. As you can see below, Paul Davies had us prepped for a while with an awesome sketch, with the series’ most popular characters, Adelia, Gaston, Lucinda and Merlin, all on the front cover. In fact, we liked the composition of this so much that it’s likely when we go for trilogies of our other characters, we’ll run things the same.
Paul wasn’t available to complete the piece, but he gave his blessing for fellow UK artist Steven Bellshaw to take the reins, and continue things along. Steven, who you may know as one of our more prolific artist collaborators, gave things a coat of paint to start, and extended the book cover to the spine and rear as well. As much as the the quartet on the front are important, we knew that Forsynthia was a special character all its own, so we have that as a focal feature of the back cover.
With a little bit of polish, we started to see things a little more clearly. We briefly lose the magic ring around the characters in the background, but you can certainly see them a bit better. The keep on the back cover grew pretty tall, so we asked to adjust that somewhat. And we also got our first look at the gatehouse, which was originally built to look sort of like a house itself, but you’ll see that was adjusted.
The biggest changes to the next iteration was that things on the back started to look much more like the way that we envisioned them. The keep is “open air” and the gatehouse actually surrounds the road leading to Forsynthia. Along the way, little bits of polish have been added to the characters too.
Still more polish showing up on background elements, and we also see the return of the runic circle behind Gaston and Lucinda! One of the other things that got a hefty amount of polish on this update was Adelia’s staff. It’s an important feature of her character in the third book, and it’s long been featured in a lot of her art—so much so that we actually integrated it into the story.
And here you can see the final iteration of the cover. With all its polish, some ice magic fluttering about, and a twist to a golden runic circle behind the characters, everything seems that much more magical. I was very impressed by the work of both of our artists on this piece, and I could not be happier with the cover of our first trilogy in ten years!
We’ve got some more Adelia stuff to show off, as you haven’t yet seen how Leo brought her third book to life, so be on the lookout for that. It’s going to be a while yet, as we have plenty of things that are taking precedence!
Michael DeAngelo
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