Basewood Cover Design: Part 5

Thanks to everyone who voted on the various Basewood cover designs!  As I mentioned last week, I also had all of my students vote on the designs.  They each listed their top three picks, so I awarded three points for their first pick, two points for their second pick and one point for their third pick.  Here were the results:

• First Years: #1 - Silhouette (40 pts)  #2 - Fire (20 pts)  #3 - Skullz (16 pts)
• Seniors: #1 - Silhouette (34 pts)  #2 - TIE! Fire/Skullz (15 pts ea.)  #3 - Snow (10 pts)

It was pretty cool seeing how both classes had pretty much the same opinions.  Each voting session was also accompanied by a lively debate about the various merits of each design.  Again, as a self-publisher I have only ever been concerned with creating what I think is the best image for a book, so it was interesting to discuss things like marketing concerns.  For instance, some of my female students pointed out that if I put Caren on the cover, more women would be likely to buy the book.

It was great getting all of this detailed feedback, but at the end of the day, the opinion that mattered most was that of my publisher, L'employé du Moi.  I sent them the same voting sheet and they selected the four covers they liked the most:

• Cliff, Silhouette, Fire, Snow

Again, it felt great that their picks were in line with the student choices.  This gave me confidence that no matter which design I picked from these four, it would make a successful cover image.  I was asked to make a few tweaks to the compositions, so I did one last round of sketches based on the four selections:

Next week I'll finally reveal the "chosen" design and then I'll start showing my process for making the finished art.