Page 502 - August 15, 2013

Hannu still has a good deal of Finnish sisu left in him. It only comes out when he's actually in danger of dying, othervise he's all "ugggh, effort..."

So apparently I still don't look like an adult person. A man from the Swedish TV-tax/fee place knocked on my door yesterday to ask about my TV and Internet connections for their registers, and when I opened the door he went "oh, hi are your pare-" *looks at papers* "-I mean are you the person who lives here now?" Me: "yeees..." TV-tax man: "...and you're over 18?". Guhhh, I'm over 23 already. And that's what happened yesterday, dear diary! The rest of the day I spent drawing pages 13 and 14 of SSSS, almost finished both.

Anyway, I promised to show my mockup sketch of the aRTD book cover! And thank you guys for all the encourgement yesterday. I shared my worries, got them off my shoulders, and from now on until next month's Indiegogo campaign is over I'm going to share nothing but optimism and excitement and rainbows! Here's the first rainbow:

It's still quite rough and I'll clean it up some more before it's presentation-time. Here's also a close-up of the sketch of the symbol for the front cover:

Having the Hannunvaakuna symbol on the cover seemed like a given all along, and back when I realized that the eight chapters would fit in the eight "slots" I knew I had to design something out of that. Originally I thought of adding a shot of the non-dream world scenery into the middle slot, but then I realized that losing the open dark space in the middle would kind of make the overall form of the symbol disappear.

I might move/add/delete/change elements between now and the time it's ready for print, but I'm pretty happy with the overall design and probably won't do any radical overhauls. The text on the spine is still a complete placeholder though, I think I want to draw the title in a slight wood-carving-ish way. Other than that: no text on the cover! No back blurbs and no ugly printed barcodes, if someone somewhere sometime for some reason happens to sell a copy of the book in their store they'd have to use a sticker for that.

I also have some ideas for possible stretch goal improvements to the book! The light grey parts of the cover would look really great with actual silver-colored foiling, and embossing of the dark parts of the "wood" would give it a fun three-dimensional feel. Or maybe the light woody parts could be the embossed ones, that might be an even more interesting solution.

Aaalsooo I drew a quick quick whatchamacallit model-thingie of the book to check how the front cover works on its own, and I'm happy enough:

That's it for today! And if you guys have any things in mind that you love seeing on book covers or come to think of some useful/cool features I'd love to hear them, I might have totally forgotten about some "coolest thing in books ever" elements while I was designing this. Or if you just have general or random feedback. :3

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