Eugène Viollet-le-Duc – { feuilleton }

The Heart of the Lost Star

Presenting my cover for the third book in Megan Derr’s gay fantasy series, Tales of the High Court. Since this cover follows a pattern established with the first book in the series, The High King’s Golden Tongue, I’ve posted volumes one and two below for comparison. In my post about the series last year I said that I appeared to have exhausted the Viollet-le-Duc illustrations which I was plundering for the (collaged) architectural frames. As things turned out I was able to work up a new one but if this series continues then further ingenuity will be required.

The Heart of the Lost Star will be published by Less Than Three Press later this month. Meanwhile, I have a number of other projects—most of them horror-related—waiting to be officially revealed. As always, watch this space.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tales of the High Court

Tales of the High Court

I thought I’d already written something about my cover for Megan Derr’s gay fantasy novel, The High King’s Golden Tongue, but it seems not. This appeared last year from Less Than Three Press, and the next volume in the Tales of the High Court series, Pirate of Fathoms Deep, has been published this week. My earlier omission allows me to show both covers together.

When working on the first volume I didn’t expect I’d also be working on a sequel so there was no need to consider whether the design could be carried over. The architectural frame is from a book about French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, taken from one of Viollet-le-Duc’s illustrations for a study of the architecture of old France. I added the windows and curtains before colouring the stones and providing shadows and highlights. This became a problem for the second cover because my Viollet-le-Duc book only had one example of this kind of stonework. After some lengthy searches at Gallica I was able to find enough scans of other pages from the books that Viollet-le-Duc illustrated to piece together a new frame. The Gothic window frames on both covers are from another French volume, and I’ve now exhausted all those examples so a third volume in this series will no doubt present further challenges.

Viollet-le-Duc

One of a great quantity of Gothic studies by French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc at Wikimedia Commons. Also in the Commons is a large selection of photographs and drawings of the fortified city of Carcassonne which the architect controversially restored.