Seeing You cover process

R/L's latest, Seeing You is out! i can confidently say this is my new favorite book from him, it is So unrepentantly horny in all the best ways. we love overwhelming public sex fantasies in this house. if you want some primo hardcore "jesus christ i am being psychically attacked by cock dreams during WORK HOURS" porn, you want to pick this one up. it is so good.

okay process post time

THUMBNAILS!

so for this one, lee didn't have a clear visual for what he wanted. "the only vague notions I had in my head were like, eye imagery, maybe something a little saul bass, or playing up the office/news setting angle somehow" so i gave him these, trying to play with the TV screens, like how news offices always have that big wall of them.

lee liked the first one the most, but it wasn't obviously sexy enough. we thought about censorship bars and mosaics from old tv before they just blurred everything. i did the second version of it that added the finger biting to up the sexiness, and then we had the thought of putting scrambled porn on the screens in the back.

THE SKETCH

scrambled porn is weird. i never saw it on a tv IRL but it's weird and difficult to emulate. luckily i did not ultimately have to because lee didn't like it. it had too much of a psychedelic vibe that didn't quite match the story, and it wasn't clear that sex was happening with the silhouettes all wibbled. so i brought it back to the original look of the first thumbnail, and we moved forward with that.

THE FINISHING

 the funny thing about the process on this one is that it's the first time lee and i disagreed about what looked better. i don't prefer the version with the bright jewel tones and maximum saturation that ended up being the final, i tend to mute things down a little with texture and gradient maps. this is his favorite cover, but it's probably my least (my favorite is still meatheads). but he likes it, and the story fuckin Bangs, so all is well.

i also sent him this version like six hours later and we both liked it but it made it less obvious that Sex was happening, which is the most important thing in a cover for a book where sex is happening. so we didn't use it but it's still neat.

anyway go read the book where sex happens!! it's So good.