Recently, I was hired by local author Theresa Griffin Kennedy to design the cover for her short story collection Burnside Field Lizard. (How's that for a title!) Theresa has her fingers in lots of different areas of the arts community - as a writer, a journalist, an activist and more. I first became aware of her when she interviewed Margaret Malone on Oregon Voter's Digest (Margaret has the clip on her website here).
When I'm working directly with authors, they often come with ideas or expectations or images they'd like to see incorporated. Theresa had a picture she wanted to use because of its randomness and its dynamic look.
It was taken by her daughter Amelia Kennedy. It's a very interesting picture with great lines, but unfortunately it's very small, and I'd need something quite a bit larger for print quality. Also, there isn't much space in the picture to add the elements you need for a book cover without blocking too much of the imagery. I needed more space around the central figures.
Now, coincidentally, I just so happen to have two plastic dinosaurs, a blue one and a yellow one, that sit by my computer monitor at work. Actually I have a third dinosaur, and a little toy dog, and a little toy race car, but that doesn't matter. (I got the dinosaurs in a goodie bag along with some other fun stuff at a wonderful and weird Portland art shop called Boys' Fort - thanks, Boys' Fort!) I also happen to have orange counters in my kitchen. (Not our optimal color scheme and it will change some day, but, yay, who knew that orange would come in handy!)
So, I offered to recreate the picture.
That was fun. Water and ice in the glass gave me cloudy white rather than orange, so I poured some margarita mix in the water. Then I added some red wine. Then I drank it. Just kidding. In the original photograph, I like the straw a lot for composition, but for my purposes it would have gotten in the way, so I left that element off. I took a bunch of shots, moving the ice around to get different playing fields for my title and blurb. I played with photoshop to get the shade and vibrancy I wanted, and actually, I did a little cut and paste photoshopping on the blue dinosaur because its head was turned too much to one side.
It was fun, too, to figure out where the text would look good within the space of the picture, following the angles of the glass and the tip of the dinosaur tail. Here's the finished product.
With thanks to Amelia Kennedy for snapping the picture in the first place. I'm not sure how I'll word
And an excerpt from one of her stories. This is from "The Convalescent Home in the Doug Fir Wood."
We sat in the living room in the evenings, blankets and quilts covering our legs. The room stone cold, the fireplace empty, with long shadows meandering on the fine Morris wallpaper, but surrounded by all our ancient furniture and other fine objects Mother dusted religiously. The candles that had recently replaced the electric lamps gave faint light and added to the haunted atmosphere of two women alone.
Despite our seeming wealth, there was not enough food in the icebox to feed us. We lived on boiled eggs, fried potatoes and English tea cooked upon the wood stove that had sat unused for decades in a corner of the large kitchen but was now our only means of survival. Mother used it to cook our food, heat the kitchen, and boil our bath water.
As fuel Mother used some rotten pine and apple wood that had been placed in a woodshed behind the abandoned rose garden years before by the gardener. Mother's entire history was dissolving and she was unable to find a solution that could reserve our living room view of the city of Portland and the NW flats so far below our gaze.
On the day I met the lawyer, he was walking by the school dressed in a full suit and overcoat and heading south, to where the Gypsies used to live...
Burnside Field Lizard will be published by Oregon Greystone Press in May of 2018.
More info about Theresa Griffin Kennedy is here.
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