 When
I got the cover assignment for We Never Said Goodbye, Dan Murr,
author of the book (a collection of short pieces), asked me to use an
image from the title tale, which concerns the sinking of the Great Lakes
ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald, in November of 1975 during a storm
on Lake Superior.
As
it happens there is a lot of information on this disaster and I had
little trouble finding images of the vessel. I at first considered building
a 3D mesh, but I quickly changed my mind when I realized how much time
it would take me. Instead I went with a composite image constructed
of altered photos of the ship and hand-drawn water/weather for storm
effects. I wanted as painterly a "look" for this piece as I could manage,
so I used several Photoshop filters on the image to reduce the
photographic quality of the boat. The last thing I did was to impart
a slight glow to it. I was thinking of St. Elmo's fire when I did so,
but the effect was meant primarily to bring the Edmund Fitzgerald
out of the background a little. My one regret is that I couldn't figure
out a good way to make the Fitz appear as it it was wallowing
in the sea, rolling or pitching; instead it seems to be plowing steadfastly
through calm waters while the sea goes bananas all around it.
My
biggest concern with the piece was, believe it or not, to capture a
particular quality of water and sky. It took me longer to do the sea,
for example, than the ship itself. I captured some "sky color"
from a photograph of a stormy day on a lake and used that as a basis
for the curdled appearance of the background. At the same time, of course,
I couldn't allow the boat to be obscured by rain, as it surely would
have been in real life. The sky and the sea more or less dictated the
range of colors I could use -- I tend to a brighter selection of colors
in general, but this piece has a far more somber tone than most of my
other work. (About the only bright spot is the yellow band around the
Fitzgerald's aft stack, and even that should have been dulled
out a bit.)
There
are several layers of water and spray, some more or less transparent.
I've always found water one of the hardest things to render in a graphic
work, but I think this looks pretty good. In any event, I'm very pleased
with the way this piece turned out, and so is Dan Murr, the author.
We
Never Said Goodbye is available from Clocktower Books.
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