All my Scholastic covers – part 3

Children of the Lamp # 5

There was nothing special or exciting about the creation of this cover. It was one of those assignments without a distinguished character, although it certainly had its charms and hurdles. The only thing that pops up in my mind when thinking about this cover is that I painted the boy’s hands slightly bigger than normal.  The publisher did not like it and I was asked to correct it, which I did in Photoshop.

Talking about the hands, I have to admit that I tend to draw large hands. When I was a student at the art academy I was influenced by the majestic sculptures of Michelangelo and Mestrović, who often made the hands of their sculptures larger than they would normally be in the real life. I liked that and I thought it added the feeling of grandeur and might to their sculptures. Both, consciously and unconsciously I adopted this approach and later on often drew and painted the human figures with large hands. Besides, I love to draw hands. My professor of drawing  often used to talk about the importance of learning to draw the hands properly. He would say: “ if you want to know how developed the drawing skills of an artist are, just look at how he draws the hands…”.  Many times in the subsequent years I witnessed how true this remark was.

Children of the Lamp # 6

At this point I have shown the photo of the unfinished piece to the published. They said that the color of the carpet was wrong, and that it had to be blue, a specific kind of blue. My dear friend, Justin Gerard, was visiting me at that time, and after I received the publisher’s reaction, he helped me to change the color of the already painted carpet in Photoshop. It took us a while until we figured out what kind of blue was hiding under the color’s name that I got from the publisher (I forgot the name of that particular blue color as soon as the cover was finished. I had never heard of it before.) Then I made a print of the digital image and used it as a reference to repaint the carpet.  The repainting took several hours, and after finishing the job somewhere between 3 and 4 o’clock in the morning, I went to bed with a feeling of content.

However, when the cover was published I noticed that the colors were muddy and dark. I am afraid that the designer has forgotten to convert the image to the appropriate profile ( for it might be that I forgot to do that myself, before sending out the image) and therefore the colors turned out dirty. I can’t imagine that they did it on purpose… The requested blue color is not anymore the same color.

The image from below shows the cover of the foreign edition of Children of the Lamp # 6 (I could not  decipher the language), and as you can see their designer was a little more aware of the colors.

Have a good day!