I decided to do the cover of Brian Keene's upcoming novella "The Girl On The Glider" in watercolor for a number of reasons. First, watercolor is what I do best. It is also the painting media I have used the longest. If you go to the "Early Works" page, you can see some of the watercolor work (and the obvious Wyeth influence) I did in college. Current watercolor work can best be seen in my Roofscape series. Second, the story is set in southeast-central Pennsylvania, an area of the country I am very familiar with because I live there too, but also the area of the country where America's premier watercolorist - Andrew Wyeth - lived and worked (in the winter months of his life, anyway; summers were spent in and around Cushing, Maine). Wyeth was the single most important influence on my work, and he passed away at age 91 last year. I wanted this painting to be an homage of sorts. Third, watercolors go fast, so I should be able to finish and deliver this to CD Publications in short order.

As you can see in the preliminary drawing above (done in pencil on a large pad of tracing paper) the subject matter is an old porch glider, an outbuilding on the left, and a rising driveway that ends high at the road. Readers of the story will know exactly why this scene was chosen. The composition also leaves lots of room for the title display and the author byline typematter without obscuring the "view". If you look closely you can see a dot in the driveway above the glider. That is the vanishing point of the one-point perspective I used to get the lines of the glider and the outbuilding correct. If you look at the ring designs in the porch post, you can see that the middle ones are level with your viewpoint, the upper ones are angled down just a bit, and the lower ones ... well, the lower ones in the drawing are angled too much to "vanish" correctly at the horizon line that the vanishing point defines. When I transferred the drawing to my watercolor block, I corrected this.

I am using my old faithfuls: an Arches hot pressed, 140 pound watercolor paper (hot pressed means the paper was sent through hot metal rollers before drying, leaving a smooth surface; 140 pound weight is a medium thickness, since the range choice is from 90 pound to 400); Windsor & Newton watercolor paints, and Windsor & Newton sable brushes. Arches is simply the best commercially available watercolor paper made. Same with Windsor & Newton for the brushes and paint. Fine old (1492 for Arches!) firms, as they say. As my Dad always told me: use good tools, and half the work's done.

When completed, this will be a "pretty" painting I will be proud to frame and hang on my living room wall. Hopefully, from the reader's perspective, it will also be "creepy". The final painting will be too large to scan, so I will be shipping it down to my son-in-law, a professional digital photographer, who will create the final TIF and JPEG files. You can see on his blog his technique for photographing art, in this case, a large painting my brother gave he and my daughter for a wedding present, HERE.