I thought I’d already written something about my cover for Megan Derr’s gay fantasy novel, The High King’s Golden Tongue, but it seems not. This appeared last year from Less Than Three Press, and the next volume in the Tales of the High Court series, Pirate of Fathoms Deep, has been published this week. My earlier omission allows me to show both covers together.
When working on the first volume I didn’t expect I’d also be working on a sequel so there was no need to consider whether the design could be carried over. The architectural frame is from a book about French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, taken from one of Viollet-le-Duc’s illustrations for a study of the architecture of old France. I added the windows and curtains before colouring the stones and providing shadows and highlights. This became a problem for the second cover because my Viollet-le-Duc book only had one example of this kind of stonework. After some lengthy searches at Gallica I was able to find enough scans of other pages from the books that Viollet-le-Duc illustrated to piece together a new frame. The Gothic window frames on both covers are from another French volume, and I’ve now exhausted all those examples so a third volume in this series will no doubt present further challenges.