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Show and Tell with Lyn Taylor

[Lyn Taylor designed the cover of Prime Suspect by KS Augustin, available at Total E-bound.]


[click image for a larger version]

A lonely being in a lonely galaxy…Heron Meed has two strikes against it. It is an hermaphrodite in a galaxy dominated by two-gendered beings. And it’s a convicted criminal.

After six years of incarceration, Heron is trying to start a new life, but that isn’t easy when so many avenues are closed to it. It finally finds a refuge of sorts on the Castor Xeni Orbital and a surcease from its pain in the arms of voluptuous Subah Doisson but then various systems on the Orbital start getting sabotaged. With a small engineering population, and Heron the only newcomer to the station, how can the hermaphrodite prove its innocence amid a sea of entrenched prejudice?

In KS Augustin’s Prime Suspect, the character filling the shoes of ‘Hero’ is an Hermaphrodite, so a full body shot was going to require a certain femininity about it. Unfortunately this is where my own tastes interfere. I like ‘manly’ men LOL, so the effeminate men just weren’t working for me. I kept coming back to the current image as it was fairly indiscriminate once I’d painted out the tattoo and it had a certain amount of secrecy to it.

The background is pretty straight forward. The earth shot was one of the first images that jumped out at me. It’s just layered over a black background – voila! Space. Looking at it now, I possibly could have added some stars but the Tech brush pretty much fills that void.

Originally I think I only had the hermaphrodite character portrayed on the cover. Then the publisher asked if I could try it with the female character. We couldn’t decide which we preferred, so I put them together. Luckily the lighting worked well and I just needed to darken the images and match their colour tones. I also liked how the couple fit together. There was chemistry, so to speak and they looked like two lonely people caught in the vastness of space.

To finish it off, I decided I’d better highlight the hermaphrodite twist so I simply added the symbol for male and female together. It was after the fact that I actually Googled to see if there was actually a universal symbol for hermaphrodites – which just happened to be what I’d made up anyway. Phew!

This cover was nice and straight forward. Kaz had put quite a bit of info into her Cover Request form, which was a nice change from the usual ‘whatever the artist feels is right’. The latter comment usually comes back to bight me on the butt ;)

[You can see more of Lyn’s work here.]

This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 1:00 am and is filed under Show and Tell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

10 Responses to “Show and Tell with Lyn Taylor”

  1. Lorelie
    Posted: Oct 26th, 2007 at 6:02 am
    1

    Ooh purty. I couldn’t really see the “tech brush” until I opened up the larger image. I lurve subtle details.

    I wonder how hard it was to write in “it/she” vs “he/she” for the author.

  2. Ann Aguirre
    Posted: Oct 26th, 2007 at 6:56 am
    2

    Dude. When I first glanced at this page, I thought it said “Show and Tell with Liv Tyler.” I was like, damn, Bam knows Aerosmith’s daughter!

  3. Jaime
    Posted: Oct 26th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
    3

    Gosh, it is good to know that I wasn’t the only one who saw Liv Tyler..funny. I love the cover. When I opened the larger version I could then see all the detail Lyn was talking about. Very cool. Peace.

  4. Lorelie
    Posted: Oct 26th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
    4

    huh. I know no one will care, but here on my home computer I can see the detail without opening the large pic. At work I could hardly even see the hermaphrodite symbol. I wonder what that’s about.

  5. bam
    Posted: Oct 26th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
    5
    Author Comment

    Homegirl on the cover looks like what’s-his-face from the Crying Game.

  6. KS "Kaz" Augustin
    Posted: Oct 27th, 2007 at 5:14 am
    6

    I have to say I really love this cover. The figures, the Earth partial and the subtle background all sold me. And I even mentioned it to the wonderful Anne Cain, who did my Samhain cover for “Combat!”, because I loved what Lyn came up with.

    Lorelie, you asked what it was like to write. Oh, hard. It was okay when I was in the groove but if I left and came back to it, the impulse to type “his” instead of “its” was very powerful. I thought I had combed and combed through it before submitting to Total-E-Bound but (just to show that the mind does edit what it reads) missed one mistype.

    And thanks for the feedback on the Cover Art Form, Lyn. I always wonder whether I’m trying to tell artists how to suck eggs whenever I fill one out. ::tangent:: Why is it always “suck eggs”? Have you ever tried to suck eggs? It’s disgusting. Shouldn’t it be “blow eggs”? I know that sounds gross as well but just for correctness’ sake… ::/tangent::

  7. BevL(QB)
    Posted: Oct 27th, 2007 at 8:07 pm
    7

    This cover was nice and straight forward. Kaz had put quite a bit of info into her Cover Request form, which was a nice change from the usual ‘whatever the artist feels is right’. The latter comment usually comes back to bight me on the butt

    Any chance you can share the info on the cover request form with us? I’m curious to see what one looks like, or at least what info is on one. Plus, part of the magic is seeing the transformation from the author’s written words to the artist’s final concept.

  8. Anne Cain
    Posted: Oct 28th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
    8

    *nodsnods* I love the sensuality and sci-fi elements in the cover, Lyn! It’s my fave at TEB so far. When I worked with Kaz over at Samhain, we totally squeeeed over it. :D

    Awesome, awesome job!

  9. LynTaylor
    Posted: Oct 29th, 2007 at 12:04 am
    9

    LOL! Awww .. thanks Anne *big hugs*.

    Oh and BevL. I haven’t wanted to step on any toes so am just checking that it’s okay for me to post up the Book Art Request Form. Might be easier if I put it up at my blog but I’ll make a link to it if your still interested :D

    Cheers!

  10. Melissa
    Posted: Oct 29th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
    10

    When it comes to romance/erotic novels, I like the idea of only being able to see a partial face on the cover, or sometimes no face at all. It leaves much more for the imagination to discover. This cover does a great job at this idea.

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