Tim Pratt – { feuilleton }

The Twilight Magus

Presenting my latest cover for Aconyte’s Arkham Horror line, and the third and final book in a trilogy by Tim Pratt.

Carl Sanford, once the Silver Twilight Lodge’s great leader and now presumed dead, lives in anonymity in Spain, plotting revenge against those who betrayed him. Alone, he calculates his first move to achieve power abroad is by being initiated into the mysterious ancient society called the Red Coterie to secretly take it over. Despite Sanford’s reputation, the Red Coterie demands proof of his occult prowess, sending him on a quest to vanquish The Blood Moon, a reclusive blood magus manipulating humans and monsters alike to achieve their own ends. As Sanford uses every scrap of cunning he possesses to outwit his enemies and prove his worth, old foes from Arkham have discovered his existence and are coming to finish him off once and for all.

The brief for this one was for a design that would continue the form of the previous two volumes while incorporating details of Antoni Gaudí’s architecture, Barcelona being one of the story’s locations. I’ve admired Gaudí’s architecture for a long time but I’ve never had the opportunity to use any of it in an illustration before. Most of the details are tiny ones but the unfinished porch of the Sagrada Família is recognisable, as is the iron dragon from the entrance gate of the Park Güell. The windows behind Sarah van Shaw and Carl Sanford are also Gaudí designs.

Less recognisable, but also a Gaudí creation, is the background pattern which is more visible on the back cover of the book. My previous covers for Aconyte have all used Art Deco mofits to complement stories set in the 1920s, with several of them having elaborate background patterns. The Gaudí design was one I hadn’t seen before, a hexagonal tile in which portions of three organic forms—starfish, ammonite and algae—become whole when the tiles are placed together. It’s a beautifully simple and clever design with the additional bonus for this cover of creating a series of spirals and tendrils which suit the Lovecraftian nature of the story. If you search around you’ll find a number of places selling reproductions as either ceramic tiles or coasters in a variety of materials.

The Twilight Magus will be published in July.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Herald of Ruin

New year, new book cover. Herald of Ruin is my latest for Aconyte, a sequel to Tim Pratt’s The Ravening Deep, which featured my last cover in this series of novels spun from the Arkham Horror games:

Chaos is coming to Arkham, and its herald is Randall Tillinghast. The dapper older gentleman has recently arrived in the city and his establishment of a new occult bookshop draws the ire of Carl Sanford, the head of Arkham’s secret, esoteric order, the Silver Twilight Lodge.

Sanford expects to crush the newcomer like an ant and take what he wants from the wreckage… but Randall Tillinghast isn’t quite as humble and harmless as he seems. In possession of an array of magical artifacts, Tillinghast begins to consolidate his dreams of power before turning his sights on the Lodge.

All six covers to date have followed a similar style, combining Art Deco graphics with various kinds of Lovecraftian weirdness, views of significant architecture and pictures of the main characters. With the new book being a sequel the cover was designed as an inverse companion to The Ravening Deep. The general structure is the same but with earth tones replacing the aquarian colours, and with the character shots and interlaced septagram flipped around.

That towering edifice in the background is supposed to be the city of Sarnath which I spent some time drawing even though I knew most of it was going to be covered over. The way I work I often have to do this since I like to create all the different elements with only a vague composition in mind, after which I can shuffle things around until they assume a satisfying appearance. I also like to keep my options open in the early stages. This is something you can do more easily in Illustrator than in Photoshop, the Illustrator interface being an artboard upon which you assemble the various components of your design. Vector graphics aren’t always ideal when you’re trying to create something this complex, but the hard edges suit the Deco style and the general appearance which is more of a poster design than a picture window.

Among the other details, the eye-in-a-triangle, a device I’ve used a lot in the past, was prompted by the source material for a change. And the woman’s face is based on a photo of Musidora, one of the stars of early silent cinema in her role as Irma Vep from Feuillade’s Les Vampires (1915–16). The visual source for this character wasn’t very informative but she’s a cat burglar, and Feulliade’s serial happens to concern a group of Parisian cat burglars. I think Irma Vep may have been the first cat-burgling woman in cinema history so Musidora was a good choice with the right look for the cover.

Herald of Ruin will be published in July.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Ravening Deep
• Diamonds
• The Devourer Below
• Litany of Dreams
• The Last Ritual

The Ravening Deep

Presenting my latest cover in the Arkham Horror spin-off series for Aconyte. The Lovecraftian menace this time is oceanic:

When dissolute fisherman Abel Davenport discovers an ancient temple in the deep ocean, he falls under the influence of a long dead god. In his attempts to restore the god’s cult, Abel unleashes a plague of twisted doppelgangers on Arkham. Horrified by the consequences, Davenport realizes that he alone cannot stop the monsters from resurrecting the Ancient One.

Sometimes the only way to end one cult is to start another… Teaming up with redeemed cultist Diana Stanley and notorious thief Ruby Standish is the first step. The second is convincing Carl Sanford, the powerful leader of Arkham’s Silver Twilight Lodge, to join their cause. Together they might be the only hope of averting a cataclysmic eldritch invasion.

This was more of a challenge than some of my earlier covers for the series since there was a lot to fit in. That star shape in the background is an interlaced pattern like the sigil underneath the author’s name but it ended up being covered over, something I wasn’t intending but I always let these things grow organically rather than try and force everything into a preconceived design. As before, everything has been put together in Illustrator which presents its own challenges when you’re trying to achieve Photoshop-style airbrush effects. I like the way Illustrator restricts the graphical treatment to shapes, colours and hard edges, something which is perfect for these Deco-style covers. With Photoshop there’s always the temptation to start making everything more like a painting. A few of the aquatic details are adapted from Maurice Verneuil’s L’Animal dans la Decoration (1897), a book for artists showing stylised treatments of various animals and plants. I’ve had Verneuil’s book for a while as a Dover reprint but never found much use for it before.

This isn’t the last cover I’ve done this year, there’s another one still to be made public but it won’t be ready now until early in the new year. The Ravening Deep will be published in August 2023.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Diamonds
• The Devourer Below
• Litany of Dreams
• The Last Ritual