Let’s start out with this piece.  This is the first time that I put anything together like this, because I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted the cover to look like.  I knew that I wanted the characters in a tavern, and that I wanted them kind of posed at a table.  I’m not great at sketching things myself, but I found a tool online that is spectacular for posing (and great help for artists that want their work to be anatomically correct).  JustSketchMe is great, and it let me set up a roundabout way of what I wanted the D’Aprile’s Fools cover to look like for Leo.

After that, Leo went to work making it his own.  My original sketch was far too wide for a front cover, but it gave the better understanding of where we were trying to go for it, and it allowed Leo to compose things better.  Six characters is a lot for a front cover, but he made it look easy.

Leo didn’t only fit them in, he made them pop.  This is the most characters we’ve ever featured on the front cover, even considering things like Tales of Tellest.  And each of them looks like part of the crew.  From left to right, we have Bixby Alladocious, Caira, Frederic D’Aprile, Leonell, Nellie and Mireya.

But of course a full book cover has a back, so we had Leo keep working…

If you click on this cover, you’ll see a full sized version of it.  We had to tweak things a little bit because our other two characters on the back weren’t fully centered, so this isn’t the final version.  Leo worked on it a bit more though, and you’ll see that final version here:

Assuming the book is out now, all you have to do to pick it up is click this link.  Check out D’Aprile’s Fools on Amazon today!

The post Cover Art – D’Aprile’s Fools appeared first on Tellest.

One of the things that you’ve seen, most likely, is the completed artwork that’s going on the Quantum Quest game box, and what we’ve used for our Kickstarter.  What you have not seen just yet is the steps we took to get there.  Let’s change that today!

Internally, we knew which of our characters from the game set we wanted to feature on the cover the most.  We voted on our favorites, and went from there.  I wanted some cohesion between the Tellest books and the Tellest games, so I reached out to Leo to do banner art that would have felt a lot like a front book cover anyway.

Obviously we had already had the logo in place, thanks to Francois.  Leo also had the benefit of looking at the card art we already had, and the bunch of art we had in place for Alicia.

Here’s something curious, and I hope Leo doesn’t take any offense to me teasing him a little bit.  Every time he takes a character that has red hair, he always makes it bright, fluorescent red.  I wonder if there’s something getting lost in translation between us.

After tweaking the hair, we had our semifinal cover.  It was fantastic, and it remains one of my favorite works that Leo has done thus far.

And here’s your grand finale, with the logo and everything.  I hope you like what you’ve seen, and are eager to see where we go with an eventual expansion!

If you want to check out the game on Kickstarter, just click this link.  Hope you like what you see!

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So let’s get right down to business then, shall we?  We’ve already shown you work from Lord of Thunder and Transformed, so it stands to reason that we should show you the next sequel in our Tellest Legends collection.

Arise is the follow-up to the very well-received Awake.  Where we looked at psychology in a fantasy world with the first book in this series, with dreams, guilt, post traumatic stress and so on, in Arise, we knew we needed to raise the bar somewhat.  With Venathryn cured of the dreamplague, we needed a new challenge for Maravek in the follow up.  He and Vandelas head to Versali-Virai, a land far away, to help the people there with an even greater threat that comes when they should be slumbering.

Here’s how we started piecing together the cover:

The first thing you’ll likely notice is just how busy the cover is.  There is a lot going on in this story.  It’ll be fighting with The Fall for the biggest cast, I’m sure.  Whereas Awake focused on just two characters (and only one on the cover), we have a quartet of powered individuals that grace the cover of Arise.

We opted to go with this variant of the original sketch, because it gives a more gloomy, monstrous feel.  Our characters are in for a pretty decent fight on account of the mob of villagers, the spell being enacted on the minotaur statue and the shadow creature in the back there.

Here, the landscape is put together a lot more.  Leo did a beautiful job bringing Versali-Virai to life in one of its darkest hours.  You can see the bazaar in the background there, and the gorgeous architecture even further in the distance.

The minotaur also gets a fresher coat of paint, and it makes him look plenty imposing.  It’s still coming together at this point though.

Two of our leads are fully realized at this point—well, except for Maravek’s feet.  There’s a good reason for that though!  Joining him on the front cover is Venathryn, our hero from the first book.  She went over so well for so many people, we had to figure out a way to get her involved, and we pulled some pretty cool strings to get everything working the right way.

Both the crowd and the looming shadow are given some badass new looks here.  There’s a lot of that red magic floating around, so you can see that this locale is a bit more dangerous than a few goblins in a forest.

We’re almost to the end here.  Our other two leads, Vandelas and Faradorn, grace the back of our cover.  Vandelas was introduced in Awake as another elf in Venathryn’s sect, while Faradorn was introduced in the short story The City of Light and Darkness.

We had one huge change to make here.  With his grey hair, Vandelas looked a little too much like Geralt of Rivia (a favorite of Leo’s, mind you).  We gave him a blond main that made him look a little more like a classic elf instead.

Here you have it, our final piece.  There were only a few more changes here—some lighting and texture shifts, but it’s important! Also, I forgot to mention it earlier, but you can see why Maravek’s feet weren’t finished.  He’s obscured by the shadow of that frightening creature in the back there.

That’s about it for now, but we’ve got another gorgeous cover coming your way in about three weeks.  You can’t say that Leo wasn’t prolific!

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Still, we’ve yet to see a single pegasus, chimera or unicorn anywhere in the world.  Sure, we’ve seen golems and dragons and whatnot, but where’s the freaking other creatures?

I honestly don’t have an answer for you, but I will say this: at the very least, pegasi are on their way.  I have had a story brewing for about two years now that will lead into Tellest’s third volume of books (with luck).

And here’s another thing to say: we may not have a story in Tellest to say about our latest concept art, but we still do have a funny anecdote!

So, the whole point of this griffin here, which we commissioned from Leo, was that we needed a badge to be our “early bird” for the Kickstarter.  At the time, Keota was just a gleam in my eye, so we couldn’t use him.  We came up with the idea of getting a griffin in there.

Within like three days, Leo had this guy made up, and it’s one of the most gorgeous greek beasts I’ve ever seen.  It definitely makes me want to think of a use for him.  Harry Potter had Buckbeak, and everyone seemed to like him.  You gotta figure a griffin is close enough to a hippogriff to get some love!

We’re very happy with how this little piece of concept art turned out.  We’re hoping to get more mythological and mystical beasts all over the sight in the future!

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This week, we wanted to share with you some of the side work that Leo has done for us.  Leo is as valuable a member of our team as anybody, and I’m so lucky to have met his acquaintance, even though he’s on the other side of the Atlantic!

One of the things Leo did for us was help us put together a bonus for all the folks that purchased the paperback version of Tales of Tellest. Below, you’ll see the bookmark that’s going out in the mail later this week into next week.

We also wanted to get together something that could serve as a generic short story cover, since we’ve got so many coming out these days.

We came up with the idea to use Gaston, our do-it-all sage, as the model.  He’s got that quintessential wizard look, and it made this just look so darn good.

If you caught the short story we posted earlier this week, you may be familiar with this piece.  This is the first time it’s been shown in all of its glory, though.

Thank you again to Leo, who has always done such an amazing job for us.  He really deserves a lot of praise!

The post Art – Leo Grab Bag appeared first on Tellest.

Since the first trilogy in the Tellest grand series is out, I knew that I wanted to put together a bundle for readers – something that they could get for a bargain that let them get their hands on all the stories at one time.

To get to that point, we needed to wait for the covers for the individual novels to be completed.  Leo worked tirelessly on The Bindings of Fate, As Darkness Falls and The Enemy Within, and we landed with three spectacular pieces of art.

After that, I went to Paul, who is just so adept at putting together components into a nice package, and wrapping it with a nice bow. We decided to make a nice 3D Box image that we would see the spines of the books within.

Our first mockup is very rudimentary.  It had the basic package design in place, complete with the Tellest logo and tagline up at the top.  That’s great for a website, but the motto doesn’t really hold to this particular boxed set.  We also had the books out of order, and the spines are a little boring by themselves.

Another small adjustment that we tried was adding a sword to the front cover.  It fills the space, and it’s simple enough that it doesn’t hurt the spine artwork.

This update was more complete, and more indicative of the final package.  You can see that the books were reordered chronologically, and the spines were adjusted so that the more interesting aspects of the full covers were seen – obviously this wouldn’t be possible with a physical book set, but since this is digital, we were free to make it look as awesome as possible.

The front cover was redesigned a little bit, too, with Child of the Stars Trilogy taking up the biggest piece of real estate.  The motto was dropped and the logo was moved up too.

And here’s the final piece.  We centered the title a little better and Paul worked his magic on some finishing touches.  In the end, I think we had a great product that we could deliver to new fans of the world of Tellest!

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This is going to be a pretty massive post, because Leo and I never worked harder than we did on this incredible cover here.  There was so much back and forth, and I felt it was important to get the protagonist just right.

When we were successful with the Kickstarter campaign, we managed to nab a stretch goal that would see us updating all of our older titles (that being the original trilogy).  Though The Bindings of Fate already has a half cover on the ‘zon, we knew we needed a full cover when we were ready to go to paperback.  Here was our process:

As you can see, we came up with a basic concept for what we wanted on the front cover.  This has been the front cover that’s been on my brain since I wrote the book, I just didn’t have the means to make the version I wanted to with my limited skills.  Leo managed to take what I had in my head like Dumbledore did to Harry in that one movie with the wizards.

If you’ll notice, the background doesn’t change at all.  We knew what we were going for as it pertains to all the players in back – it was the foreground and front cover that needed the most love.

The top two were the runners-up.  The first one was easy to discard, just because I didn’t like the idea of our hero looking straight at the reader.  That, and the antagonist – Raithly in this instance – teleporting to the back cover seemed a little jarring.

Our second choice was a little more dynamic, and most likely would have made the cut were our winner not so spectacular.  It features Kaos doing battle with Essex, and had the bonus of having Dirk in the foreground as well.

But that third one put Kaos in the spotlight, with Essex in the background.  It would have featured Dirk more prominently as well, but the final picture didn’t end up like that.  You’ll see the changes we made as things continued along.

Here, you can see the progress we began making.  At first, Leo did some magic on the whole piece.  The characters had more life, and you could really distinguish who was who in these particular sketches.  Steel Tip, Juramentado, Raithly and Adelia are preparing to do battle in the fight for their lives.

Kaos and Essex, too, are coming together, including the layout of the equipment and the armor.  Dirk is still an amorphous blob, but it looks wholly promising.  Even the locale itself seems so full of life here!

And here is where things are beginning to look spectacular.  The back is almost entirely done at this point, and the characters seem fully realized.  The castle has textures and lighting effects, and even the front of the cover has a background that really pops.

The only thing that really needs to be adjusted at all are the characters that we’re going to be focusing on in the book.

The cover really came together in that next step, but some sacrifices had to be made.  Dirk just didn’t fit into the overall picture, and we had to make a very difficult cut with that in mind.  Kaos and Essex, meanwhile, made some astonishing progress, including the display of Wildfire and the Sky Talon.

Of course, things just weren’t quite perfect yet, and we needed to rectify those things.  For one, there was a little too much Jack Black to our hero.  He looks a little bit too much like a hobbit in this variation, and Kaos is old enough and fit enough here where he shouldn’t have had as round a face as he did.

Leo proceeded to age him up and skinny him down a bit, and you can also see that the saturation was brought down a little bit.  I’m usually very flexible with these covers, and I think that Leo did a great job with it, as he always does, but I wanted to perfect it.

I had to bring in help, in the form of Rhianna.  You can see, here, the steps we took to alter him sufficiently, and give him the look we were ultimately going for.

The first thing we needed to do was dial back his jawline a bit.  He was still a little pudgy, which isn’t necessarily bad, but it wasn’t the view we were expecting to put out.

After that, we knew that we wanted to tighten the lips, raise the hairline and shrink the nose just a bit.

Here, you can see the difference from the original version to the variations we made.  And here’s a fun fact: all those changes that Rhianna made?  They were from her iPhone.

Leo was great about making those alterations, and before long, we had our finished cover.  With almost no more fanfare, I give you the completed piece for The Bindings of Fate:

Da da-da da!

I’m incredibly happy with all the work that was put in here.  While we’ve always had our artists cranking out impressive cover after impressive cover, this one took a lot of effort, a lot of creative input, and it came out on the other side looking so darn good.

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Sometimes, when you’re working with an artist, everything just works right from the start.  I’ve been working with Leo, and while every time he delivers a stunning product, there have been a few times where it seems he just knows exactly what’s in my mind, and puts it right to page.  I think that’s one of the tough things about being a writer with no real artistic talent.  It can be difficult to have this impression of something in your mind and not be able to get it out properly without conveying it to people in words.

When I told Leo what I wanted to see for the cover of The Tinker’s Tale, this was almost exactly what I expected:

Leo is also getting used to the layout of the Tellest logos, titles and authors – For Son of the Storm, we had to get a little creative.

And despite how cool it could have been, I had to say no to this version:

The Tinker’s Tale of avoiding flying death.

Sometimes you just have to say no to dragons, even in fantasy.  If Maximus had come up against them, you can be sure I would have allowed them to share cover space with him.

Around this time, we decided that Seramore was a very important part of the story.  Though the countryside aspect had some impact, especially early on in the tale, it wasn’t as integral as this massive city that Maximus would be discovering.  So we came up with this:

I can’t even watercolor 1/10th this good.

It was a big improvement on the message that the story conveyed. There’s something about the urgency here that you didn’t really get when you were in the woods.  You can also see that our protagonist is progressively getting less scruffy here.

Once Leo knew how pleased I was with this concept, we moved on to the final piece.  Again, I can’t begin to express how easy this cover was to work on.  Leo did an amazing job.

This just pops.

At the end of the process, we had something that was so simple, yet so evocative.  The turn around time was ridiculous, too.  I think Leo managed to get this to me in less than a week after the original sketch.

After that, we just had to put together our final touches, including the logo, title and author, courtesy of Paul Davies.

And, voila!

It really could not have been easier.  I’m very pleased with the final product, and I’m hoping that when it releases on Amazon next week, its potential readers find it expressive and attractive enough to agree with me!

The post Art: The Tinker’s Tale Cover appeared first on Tellest.

Mageborn was a very tame book, and so it had a very tame cover.  It was whimsical and colorful, beautiful for sure, but since the story doesn’t highlight a lot of action, we didn’t want to focus a lot of it in the cover.  Son of the Storm, the second book in the Tales of Tellest series, has a much grittier theme, and culminates in a lot of darker, colder tones.  On top of that, it focuses more on the alien races of Tellest rather than the magical veil that surrounds the world.

We knew that we wanted to focus on the human protagonist, Bolt Thunderfury.  It’s a tale that is ultimately about him, even though its told from the perspective of his adoptive father.  But we also couldn’t set the dwarven people by the wayside.  So, too, we wanted to focus on their ancient foes, the harpies.

As with Mageborn, we had a terrific amount of options and wiggle room.  Here is a selection of sketches that we loved but set aside.

As you can see, they were all pretty fantastic.  There were a lot of choices to be made, but we finally came to a decision.

There was something about that selection that spoke to me more than anything else.  It had a brilliant focus, and we could bring more of the novella into the cover.  After some further sketches, we knew we were onto something great.

It’s always so cool to see where Leo starts to where he ends. Practically magical in its own right.

Finally, we arrived with our finished product, which is just breathtaking.  Check out the final piece below.

The post Art: Son of the Storm Cover appeared first on Tellest.

Leo and I first started by discussing what was necessary for the cover of Mageborn.  We knew we needed to represent the main character, Adelia Kreegan, and we also knew that her interaction with the story’s feline companion would be a nice introduction to the most whimsical of the Tales of Tellest.  We also contemplated the inclusion of the major antagonist of the story, the great tyrant black dragon, Scar.

Ever one to give his clients a choice, Leo provided me with four options to choose from:

While each of those sketches were appealing to me in their own way, especially in light of some of Leo’s prior work, we decided to focus on one that had more of a hopeful, lighthearted cover instead:

We were really able to capture that delightful whimsy, thanks to the runes and magic literally jumping off the page.  The sketch, while very ably demonstrating his talent, does very little to showcase just how powerful his skills as an artist.

Here is the final piece.  Take note of all the beautiful minor details – he did a wonderful job, and fully established his spot in Tellest history.

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