This is my first sequel design, and I couldn’t be happier with it. Power Author 1 was my first “big break” in cover design, and since then I’ve enjoyed partnering with Ben Wolf on other books. I guess he liked the first one enough to book me for the series. *cheers*
Cover Design for Ben Wolf’s “Power Author”
I designed this cover for Ben Wolf, author of Ghost Mine and the Blood Mercenaries series. This was my first time designing a nonfiction work, so my style had to adapt to accommodate for it. Instead of creating a scene or relying on a cinematic design, I wanted “writing book” to be the first message a potential buyer would get. That called for a light cover and the word “author” as big as I could get it. Ben also asked if I would include a book that had both science fiction and fantasy elements emerging from its pages. I took color inspiration from Save the Cat!, one of the most notable writing books for fiction writers on the market. It features a bold orange that goes against cliché color pallets for writing books (like red and black). Instead of orange, I picked an equally-striking yellow, which led to the play off of “power” as gears, machines, and electricity. You can purchase Power Author on Amazon.
Magic of the Real Kinetic Type Video
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVkyWKQu5F0&w=560&h=315] Last summer I was able to attend the Realm Makers virtual conference, where author ND Wilson was the opening keynote speaker. His perspective on the fantasy genre and the Christian author’s role was game-changing to me, and it really left me with a new perspective on God’s creation and fantastic storytelling throughout history. Wilson believes that we live in “God’s fantasy novel,” in that, God’s creation and history is fantastic, and is the origin for all fantasy fiction (Marvel comics inspired by the Book of Judges, for example). In the original keynote, Wilson echoed some of JRR Tolkien’s and CS Lewis’s beliefs on the fantasy genre, and charged his audience to live in God’s novel as a character they would want to read about. Since a lot of his points stuck with me and other conference attendees, I wanted to adapt his talk into a short video that explained his view on fantasy, informing them of a new and unique way to see God and storytelling.
Rivera Ardis Character Design
In my Advanced Digital Graphics class, we had to break out of our graphic design comfort zones and focus more on creating our own graphics to amplify our skillsets. One of our projects required us to do a character design or portrait, so I decided to draw my main character from my novel. While it’s not particularly my favorite digital painting ever, it taught me a lot about warm light and cool shadows, perspective, and drawing a character within a setting (something I’m pretty terrible at), so this was a really enjoyable project. I got a B+ on this project.
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