On book cover design, dark drawings, and The Common Breath's Brian Hamill

When fireflies dance from the open wound of your mouth. When you have talked graves free of their bones, dug wasps from their homes. Stung truth with a raw tooth. When grief has bitten your hand for feeding it the names of the lost. When you have found a secret garden within the reckless brambles of your heart, where the silence deepens until trees wail by comparison.

– excerpt from ‘Break in Case of Silence’, by Zachary Kluckman

As a designer of book covers, there are many key moments during the process, starting from the first email offering a commission, to the point when you have the finished book in your hand. That moment when the courier drops off the heavy cardboard box, the parcel tape is slit through, the crumpled paper stuffing is bundled aside and then – there are the books. And there is your front cover staring up at you in rows of fours and sixes. That moment is a blend of excitement and terror; what if something has gone wrong between finally letting go of the design, and hitting ‘send’ – and the printer at the presses hitting ‘print’?

What if there’s a rogue overprint in there? What if I’ve fumbled my keyboard at the last moment and inserted a typo? Thankfully – usually (but not always) – the book cover will print pretty much as I would have hoped.

Any designer will confirm that what you see on your screen is often quite far removed from what appears on the book when that printed copy finally arrives. I’ve always had a tendency to go dark with my artwork, it’s just always been my thing: moody, shadowy, detail obscured in gloom. In publishing though, that can present problems, especially for book covers. I would hope, though, that the publisher who trusts me to front up their book knows what to expect of me. When I’m given the freedom to create, I will tend towards the darker end of the spectrum.

I’ve been fortunate enough in the past few years to have been asked by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies (ASLS) to design covers for their annual New Writing Scotland collection, which is always a joy to work on. Duncan Jones and the editors will provide a poem which has inspired the title of that year’s collection, and I’m then given the choice either to use it directly as inspiration or to do completely my own thing. For an artist that’s a real gift, as you can’t really ask for more space for freedom of expression than that. So, on reading the poem ‘Break in Case of Silence’, by Zachary Kluckman, which centres on death and grief, I found myself inspired straight away. I often find that the final piece of art I produce for a cover will not have deviated too far from my first thumbnail sketch. Again, this was the case, although maybe that says more about my lack of flexibility than my driven sense of purpose. By a weird serendipity the very morning of the day I was commissioned by ASLS, I woke to find a young rabbit laying on its side, dead, on my kitchen floor. A lovely wee thing, its head was slightly bloodied. Cursing my cat (for he it was who was responsible), I stopped to photograph the rabbit for some kind of odd posterity – little realising that I would be incorporating it into a book cover before long. Also coincidentally, the imagery of nature that Kluckman had used in his poem was already in my head. For some weeks I had been at work on my second children’s picture book, which is a story about gardening, nature, growing your own veg and occasionally letting things stay a little wild. My head was full of nettles and brambles. For this cover I saw a night scene: a rabbit lying dead in long grass, under a thicket of thorns. There’s a sprig of forget-me-not. And a tiny prick of light reflected in its eye from the hidden glow of a firefly behind a leaf. I had been out in my garden the night before, snapping some pics of a string of lights which was gradually becoming smothered in bindweed. Again, this felt like some kind of mirroring of the fireflies in the poem.

More than these surface similarities, though, the theme of grief and death had struck a chord with me. That spring in Glasgow, the publishing community was in a state of sadness over the disappearance of Brian Hamill, publisher and creator of The Common Breath. Brian had been missing for two weeks, amid reports of a young man seen (in the blandest code) ‘entering the river Clyde’. Our fears were realised when at length a body was recovered from the water. Expressions of grief and shock began to appear on social media from his fellow professionals, followed by tributes to Brian’s personality, hard work and passion for the written word. His desire had been to rediscover forgotten or obscure writers and give them a fresh lease of life, and in parallel to give the many talented but unheard voices in poetry and prose a forum to be read. His 2020 collection The Middle of a Sentence was received by the contributors and readers with such enthusiasm that it felt almost like an awkward omission that there were not already more such opportunities for new voices to be heard. It took a young man in his spare time, using his passion and dedication to the written word, to bring together the new and unpolished with some more weel-kent names, into a single book. At the time of its publication Brian was overwhelmed with requests for copies and went swiftly to reprint.

I’d had the good fortune to be invited to create covers for The Common Breath since its first publication Good Listeners, co-authored by Brian and Alan Warner. I had met Brian in person only once, years before, at a book launch for Vagabond Voices. In all the intervening time he had kept me in mind as a cover designer and with The Common Breath up and running he was finally in a position where he could commission me. Up to and throughout the period of lockdown we collaborated on a further four covers. He was generous to me with his praise, encouragement and ideas, as I’m sure he was to his written-word contributors. He was humble in his requests for changes or artistic suggestions, and self-deprecating almost to a fault. I found that he would judge his own contributions harshly which, in retrospect, makes me a little sad that he perhaps didn’t realise just how appreciated he was. Our communication was such that I counted him as more than just a colleague. Indeed, his typical sign-off was ‘my friend’ and I had been looking forward to getting together again, post-lockdown, when we could have met up in person in Glasgow for a cup of tea and a proper blether. I know that we’d have got along famously. What a legacy he has left behind — not just the handful of wonderful titles TCB has published, but a genuine void in a community, and grief in a widely scattered group of creatives. Plus an underlining of the fact that there is a real desire for further forums where unheard, uncovered or forgotten voices can be read – or read again.

In reading the tributes of the publishing community, I recognised the same traits in their relationships with Brian as in mine: ‘I got to know him via email during lockdown’ … ‘I was really looking forward to meeting up’ … ‘I felt that he was my friend’ … ‘I had no idea what he had been feeling’. It had got so close to that point of being able to meet up, when the news came through about Brian’s disappearance. It was a profound shock, and I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I had no knowledge of his real life situation, or about what may have been weighing him down. Nor was it for me to speculate. It’s unfortunate that concerning suicide, a common reaction from colleagues and friends is: ‘I had no idea.’

2020 had been a busy time for The Common Breath and in January I had just completed the cover for All to Blazes by New Zealander Frank Sargeson – a collection by another under-appreciated voice in literature. Brian and I had arrived at an image of a New Zealand ‘bach’ – or beach hut – still inhabited but with an air of abandonment and solitude; bound at the rear by trees and to the foreground by a sea of dry grasses. In many ways I felt a familiar muscle memory of this drawing as I created the artwork for Break in Case of Silence. It felt like a sombre echo of that earlier illustration: of loneliness, darkness and the passing away of a life. I worried a little not only about the physical gloominess of the drawing, but the darkness of the imagery itself. In creating it, I realised that I wanted this to be a kind of personal tribute to my friend, but I had also to remain true to the commission. ASLS were as generous as always, and enthusiastic for the cover despite my misgivings of details that might be lost under a matte laminate. I think too that Brian would have reacted favourably to it and said kind things, as, more often than not, he did. If not quite dedicated to him, this artwork was done in his memory. I hope that is fitting – ASLS and The Common Breath both share that common purpose or bringing new talent into the light.

Break in Case of Silence Editors: Rachelle Atalla, Marjorie Lotfi and Maggie Rabatski (Gaelic). Published July 26th 2021, avialable to pre-order here.

Please donate to the GoFundMe in honour of Brian Hamill, to buy a memorial bench, raise money for men's health charities, and to support The Common Breath.

The portrait took two or three days to complete. As is usually the case with a drawing, the first attempts were poor and frustrating. What you see in your head stubbornly refuses to appear on the page. When that happens it's best to leave it alone for a day, and move on to something else. So, returning to this scraggy pastel eventually, I tried to be simultaneously bold and looser and also to be more precise in the actual drawing of the details. What did Joseph look like anyway? Stewart told me he pictured him with a dark crop of hair – kind of curly perhaps. Again, a description vague enough to leave me with room for artistic license. I wanted his expression to be blank, but not vacant. It had to suggest his openness, with a slightly uplifted face. Looking to God? His glasses obscuring his eyes.

The artwork gradually took shape, and finally, in placing the image into the design itself dawned the realisation that maybe I had drawn him the wrong way around. In a notoriously dangerous move I flipped the image. (This, as any art teacher will tell you, is how an artist reveals the flaws in his or her drawing. Look at it in the mirror and the disastrous lopsidedness or skewed proportions miraculously and disappointingly reveal themselves.)  As it turned out I hadn't accidentally taken on Picasso's cubist style, and mirror-image Joseph looked relatively correct. So then I tried him small, large, centred, to the left, to the right. Too many choices make themselves available to you when you go digital. In the end, I had him facing 'outwards' to the right, centred and large. He had to be dominant. 

When I'm asked by a publisher to design a cover for another person's novel, I'm taking on a responsibility – that author's creation is being put into my hands. For a new novel, the cover becomes the book's calling card, its face. So whatever I create as that face has to be true to the tone, the flavour, the heart of that story.

Helen Lamb died in 2017, shortly after completing Three Kinds of Kissing. It was her first novel. Helen's manuscript became the responsibility of her family, and through them – and publisher Vagabond Voices – it has made its way finally into print. Her book initially read to me almost with the flavour of a junior novel – the protagonists are teenagers, the trappings an adult world impinging on young lives – but its subtext is darker, more complex: spliced into this story are strains of alienation, guilt, shame and death. It’s this subtle complexity that inspired me to design one of my more unusual covers: a wrap-around image with key points of the story encoded into it.

There's a small pink heart in the middle of the artwork. It sits above the head of Grace, the narrator, like a thought, or an exclamation.

“We stopped to look in the chemist shop window and waited for him to pass. The loofahs and long handled brushes for scrubbing backs always made us shudder, and we both coveted the Hartnell in Love talcum powder in the pink plastic heart-shaped dispenser. But right then we were more interested in watching for Peter’s reflection.” (Three Kinds of Kissing, p. 141)

I wanted that little heart to be a quiet focus of the design as a whole. It's centred on the spine of the book, which often will be the only portion of that publication that you'll see when it's sitting on a shelf. Grace is there spanning the back cover, spine and front. The hand of Peter (Grace's best friend Olive's little brother), pointing his toy gun, leads in from the front flap; the back cover teases the reader with Olive leading out of frame, on to the back flap.

The idea of a panoramic illustration came to me while I was trying to figure out how to show the dynamic between these three characters. On the face of it the scene I've depicted is almost directly lifted from the pages of the book: when Peter pursues the girls along the street while wearing his cowboy holster, cap gun in hand, peppering them with shots. Grace infuriates Olive by responding to the ever-annoying Peter by suddenly deciding to play along with his game. She playfully returns fire, her fingers in the shape of a gun; it is a sweet and unexpected moment in the narrative. I knew this would be the perfect framework on which I could hang the cover design.

In Springfield Road, he drew his cap gun and took aim. 

 BANG

 “You’re dead.”

 Just two words but a lot for him. I whipped around in time to see a puff of smoke rising from the muzzle of his gun, caught a whiff of sulphur. His eyes narrowed to vicious slits and he aimed again. The bang cracked through the air and crows took off from the rooftops squawking and wheeling in the blue sky. I ducked behind the nearest car and fired my imaginary pistol back. 

 KAPOW

 “Don’t encourage him,” Olive said and stormed on ahead.

 I pretended I didn’t hear. 

 BANG 

 KAPOW 

 BANG 

 KAPOW

We kept the gunfire going past the red phone box and on to the railway bridge. Olive was waiting for me at the far end, fuming. “Don’t you know what he’s up to? Whose side are you on?” (Three Kinds of Kissing, pp. 139-40)

Expanding my design across the entire cover, including its front and back inside flaps, enabled me to give more dimension to the story by providing the scope to show the relationship between Grace, Olive and Peter in its troubled form. Here was space to illustrate the separation that would reflect their relationships to each other, but that would also subtly mirror their positions in the narrative: Olive moving on; Peter shadowed by misfortune; Grace caught in between.

Three Kinds of Kissing takes place over two time periods: 1969 and 1973. I'm very deliberately playing up to that era with the style of illustration and the colour palette. Looking at period illustration from that time, I borrowed a discordant scheme: the spectrum of the illustration changes by degrees from sky blue, bubblegum pink and sunshine yellows, to a poppy orange, turquoise, to purples, gloomy navy and browns. From memory my own bookshelf was laden with books featuring that very distinctive style which seemed to span the late ’50s through the ’70s: stylised, heavy, ragged outlined figures, fragmented backdrops in lurid multicolour. The high street I have illustrated here is also a relic of the past. I can remember traipsing round these places with my mum in the early 1970s: chemists, grocers, toyshops, corner shops. Windows crammed with goods, colourful, varied. We can still see traces of that comparatively understated high street in today's more shouty and ever-larger signage. Those mosaic-tiled frontages hidden under layers of paint; tongue-and-groove panelling disappearing beneath sheets of PVC; hand-painted signage occasionally revealed when a shop is refitted. 

A deep well of nostalgia exists for those of us who were kids in that time. So Three Kinds of Kissingchimed with me on many levels. Set in unnamed suburban Scotland, I recognised many of the elements that formed the backdrop to the story, as that was my era too. Helen has captured a sense of those very suburban, pre-Internet, sun-drenched summers: boredom in the park, gazing through shop windows; exploring woods and walking embankments. Elsewhere in the novel we read of the moon landing, and shoe-shopping. Saturday jobs and hints of hidden troubles in the lives of the adults in the orbit of the young people at the centre of the book. Everyday elements that shaped a time. The cap gun was a very key element of every ’60s and ’70s kid's toybox: the unspooling roll of spent caps gradually snaking from the top of the pistol, the wonderful, pungent smell of sulphur from exploded caps clinging to the die-cast metal. The toy gun is also something of a signifier of changed times; the way of life from fifty years ago is rapidly becoming obsolete. It was perhaps a less protective, less self-aware society.

I wanted to create a cover that spoke the same language as the novel, and that also reflected the period. I felt I had to draw something colourful but that also carried threat. A design that looked almost as if it were from that time, reminiscent of those junior novels on my shelf, but without becoming a pastiche. Working from memory and referring to photos of the time I drew out the row of shops in pencil line, then transferred my artwork to a digital format to apply colour and texture and to maintain control of the colour palette, which was key. By keeping the background elements tonally restrained, and using no other black but on the figures' heavy, ragged outlines, I gave them prominence. Their facial features I kept largely hidden beneath curtains of hair, with their eyes out of sight. And I photographed my daughter to capture the correct stance for Grace's finger gun toting.

I wanted to create a cover that spoke the same language as the novel, and that also reflected the period. I felt I had to draw something colourful but that also carried threat.

I felt from the early stages that the cover needed a really dominant use of typography. I found a typeface that said late ’60s/early ’70s hopefully without falling on the wrong side of kitsch. I spent a long time prepping the exact proportion and arrangement of the buildings and figures to each other and to the panels of the book. In practical terms I had five panels – two covers, two flaps and the spine. But without knowing the extent of the book in the early stages of its production, a spine width had to be estimated. So I had to keep the design elements flexible.

This is where traditional illustration techniques are eclipsed by modern technology: by drawing the high street separately and by making the children movable, separate elements that could be arranged independently, I left myself some wriggle room. Furthermore, I had to make sure I was leaving myself enough usable space for back cover text and flap text: the blurb, endorsements and author biography. Without having that copy available so early in the project, I asked the publisher if the necessary wordage could be kept as concise as possible (or reasonable) as a favour, to help complement my design. I'm grateful for that level of understanding from the publisher, which gave me the leeway I was hoping for, and I was able to bring my design to a satisfactory finish.

This is what I took from reading Helen's wonderful book: characters' motives and interactions that are largely hidden from view. I hope that I've stayed true to the book's character with this, my cover.

SEX, DRUGS AND BLASPHEMY IN 17TH CENTURY EDINBURGH

When it comes to creating a new book cover, many ideas are stillborn. In this case though, I found my inspiration quick – and fully formed.

The title ‘Doubting Thomas’ most obviously brings to mind Caravaggio’s masterpiece of realist art: Jesus inviting his sceptical disciple to probe his wound with a finger or two. That painting certainly informed my thoughts as I set about designing the cover. However it was maybe more my intention to seek inspiration from the 17th century Dutch school of art in particular: dark, starkly lit, and concerned with depicting the earnest truth (or maybe it was just those ruffled sleeves on Rembrandt’s subjects that inspired me...) There followed for me then a very long series of thumbnail sketches depicting pretty much the same scene: that of the hand, sleeve and cavity.

After toying with the idea of revealing more of the cadaver, and from various intimate angles, I settled on a more conservative view of a nevertheless disturbing tableau. Eventually I set up my camera phone in my dining room and snapped my hand in a variety of positions until I found the pose I was looking for. I could use print-outs of my photos to draw from. The next night I rooted in my wife’s wardrobe for a flouncy blouse and pulling it over my right arm, again I took various snaps to guide me as to how the material would hang, and how the light would fall on it.

I blew the dust off my trusty tin of soft pastels, and proceeded to work up my drawing over 2 nights and 2 mornings. I had determined to keep this as old school as I could with as little digital footering as possible. Inevitably though I bowed a little to the electronic editing, and introduced a slight strategic blur in some areas of the drawing in order to create focus where I needed it most. 

I had a photo of a wet-nosed wee mongrel looking plaintive, and consequently the sketches I turned out weren’t great. I did sketch after sketch of pretty much the only design I had in my head, and after a number of unsuccessful attempts I requested that Paul provide me with some fresh shots of Ginger (the dug) – and they had to be in profile. This apparently would be awkward as our hero (that’s Ginger, not Paul) was “deeply uncooperative when it comes to photographs”.

I can admit to a minor lack of satisfaction in my final submissions, in that despite trying to work them up to a finish simultaneously, my style wavered from drawing to drawing just a little too much. The earlier illustrations show a more regimented, laboured line style (such as the white bedroom) as opposed to the looser, more free line evident in the latter drawings such as the homecoming. On a more technical note, I drew these on my favoured tissue-like layout paper which develops a pleasing, crinkly quality as it is worked upon. However, in retrospect a more stable surface might have given me a cleaner line. Furthermore I should probably have worked on a slightly larger scale to allow more control in my line work. These drawing are reduced only to 90 or 80 per cent on the page. Lesson learned for the next time, perhaps…

Maybe these are quibbles only the illustrator could raise; on the whole I’m satisfied with the result. More importantly, Chris Dolan is enthusiastic in his appreciation — and happy to have them alongside his story.

This blog first appeared on Vagabond Voices.co.uk

I laid down an even mid-tone, then working rapidly I sketched out the form of Edith and picked out the highlights using a particularly sticky putty rubber.