David Drummond

This is the final cover for this one with some earlier sketches. It was a tricky one because the novel is based on real people and real events - strife between a mother and a daughter during and after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It really required a photographic approach and I must have looked at hundreds of stock photos to find ones that didn’t look like stock photos but real people - not easy.

Four Elephants Press logo

I have done logos for two new press imprints in the last 2 weeks. Here is the most recent one. The other I will post next week.

Above is the final on this one and below are two also-rans. This cover problem would definitely fall into the category of “How do you show it without showing it?”

This is a mystery novel set in New York City in 1968. From the book description: “Good Girl, Bad Girl provides a rare, fascinating snapshot of late 1960s New York City - a glimpse into the forbidden sex, politics, art, drugs, and counterculture violence that ran rampant in its once gloriously gritty streets.” Below are some of the preliminary sketches I did.

The tab on this cover will be embossed.

From the vault.

For this poetry book cover the poet suggested playing with chiaroscuro - light coming out of the dark.

From the brief: “The main character in Nabokov’s last novel is the corpulent Philip Wild who is preoccupied with his own death and obliterates himself, from the toes upwards, through meditation - a deliberate self-inflicted self-erasure.” The manuscript was published posthumously against the wishes of Nabokov who wanted it burned.

This cover went through a bit of an evolution. The first option showing a map of Mexico was looking flat and uninteresting and wasn’t conveying much of the content of the book. The second had a kind of Tarantino feel to it but was still not conveying a key part of the book.

Part of my ongoing quest to make Canadian history books more enticing. O.D. Skelton was undersecretary of state for Foreign Affairs under Prime Minister Mackenzie King. Invariably a black and white photograph is supplied. I am now constitutionally incapable of just adding a duotone effect.

Cloth stamping for a recent cover.

Book deals with myth and reality of Canadian muliculturalism.

Number 4 in this series.

Schweitzer and his crazy eyebrows.

From the brief: The subject of the book is the origins in the 1920s of the first and most influential of the twentieth century's theories about how to read English poetry. Among other things, it required readers to be aware of all the meanings and uses every word in a poem ever had.