It looks as though you're scared to put the text on top of the image and therefore hiding vital parts of the image. The real cool stuff is happening on the upper-half of the building, especially in the part of the white roof. Lamplight again puts more emphasis on the fantasy-relation and mood just like the birdman image. It's quite daring to put one image on the cover that just says it all. The montage approach is used in a lot of books dealing with illustration- and painting techniques.
Would be a great image for a sci-fi art book, not a book that deals of light and color. It immediately grabs my attention in a bad way and therefore diminishes my attention the meaning of what it is all about.īirdman is too scary and too sci-fi. What bugs me is the cut-off tail on the right. The first one with the sleeping dino does tell a lot about light and what color can do with light. (I always turn a book over and look at the back before opening it up and if it surprises me with something different than the cover, I'm more likely to open it up. If you go with a single image for the cover, maybe you could fill the back cover with a montage of your color thumbnails (similar to page 34 of Imaginative Realism or pages 109 and 128 of Chandara) or smaller plein air studies where the emphasis is on the big shapes of color over realistic rendering. I like the montage idea - but maybe substitute a dino sleeping detail for birdman or a figure/ portrait where the light and shadow is the dominant design element. Sunset is a very impressive painting, but as a "cover" for a painting book on light and color it seems to be a little bit of a cliche and could be confused with others I've seen.īirdman is delightfully creepy - but for many people creepy outweighs the delightful. The one drawback is that on a book shelf, from a distance, the Street Scene cover might play as a photo. Street Scene is a very impressive painting and appeals to me more as a painter - subtlety with light and color being a goal over simply bright and colorful. It is very Gurney-esque and probably your best bet for a distinctive cover. Sleeping Dino is graceful, appealing and unique and is filled with light and color.