CHROMO Countdown: 1

Today is June 29th, and that means you only have 1 more day to pre-order the special edition of CHROMOPHOBIA. You can place your order HERE.

Today, we talk a little more in-depth about the exclusive hardcover art:

The concept (via Nicholas Day):

Production of the art for CHROMOPHOBIA began well before we even had a working table of contents. We were, after all, on a tight schedule. From announcement to completion of the project, we had roughly less than a calendar year. In publishing, that’s not a hell of a lot of time. Could we have taken longer? Of course! Publishing is famously a waiting game. But, we wanted to “strike while the iron is hot” and that meant buckling down and getting to work.

Right away, I knew I couldn’t create pieces representative of individual stories. We didn’t have individual stories to work from! So, the artwork would have to be reflective of the anthology theme: color. And, what better way to honor that theme than leaning into the spectrum? The seven colors of the rainbow quickly became the foundation for the entire aesthetic.

Now, I love a good contrast, so I started thinking of the antithesis of rainbows. My brain kept returning to a particular look, that of black metal album covers. Rarely colorful, always portents of doom, and often absolutely gorgeous, moody pieces of art. Deciding on the black metal/rainbow mash-up came pretty early. After a quick thumbnail sketch, I knew what I wanted and I knew how it needed to look.

I started prepping for the cover work before the end of June, last year. By August, my pencil layouts were more or less finished, and I began doing a few color tests, and refining my layouts using pen. The cover was a mixed-media project, consisting of acrylics, inks, and markers. I finished work on the cover by the end of September.

In October, I started to prep for what would become the interior illustrations. I knew I wanted to carry over the skull motif from the cover, as well as the rainbow color scheme. Pretty quickly, I settled on doing homage to famous women and depictions of women in art. By January, I had settled on seven different subjects, and I began drafting. All seven interior illustrations were finished between January and April.

The book was assembled soon after. We had a lot of back and forth during the proofing process. Lots of adjustments to the interior illustrations, especially. We were dead set on CHROMOPHOBIA being a knockout in hardcover. The book needed to look gorgeous, at least to us.

Whether or not we delivered is down to the individual reader, their personal tastes, and expectations!

Creating the exclusive interior art:

The finished pieces:

From left to right:

Audrey Hepburn

The Birth of Venus

Josephine Baker

Portrait of Madame X

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1 (Whistler’s Mother)

Mona Lisa

***

A whole lot of work went into creating the hardcover artwork, roughly half an entire year! But, we felt fortunate to be publishing such a great collection of stories. We knew this book was special, and we wanted our work to reflect that.

You can pre-order your hardcover edition of CHROMOPHOBIA HERE.

And, remember…