My Father has written a couple of really good science fiction novels. They are for sale on Amazon under the name Mark T. Skarstedt: “The Shore People” and “Special Metal.”  Recently, he asked me to help him get better covers for them.

I was thrilled and went to work. I started browsing Deviantart.com, sent a few notes and a few emails to artists whose work I liked, and started quizzing my friend Isaac Stewart (a fine artist and art director I’m privileged to know) about protocol.

Pretty soon we had settled on Kuldar Leement, an artist out of Estonia. Kuldar’s artistic range was quite broad and my father and I finally settled on a sweeping scene from his novel of the “orange slice” world coming apart when the black hole at its center is released.

I sent Kuldar a short description of the scene and some sketches to help explain what we wanted and the conformation of the orange slice world.

And we were off and running. The very first preliminary stab at the piece that Kuldar sent me looked like this:

Stunning and beautiful. We really wanted it to look more orange slicey though, with six segments, and for it to be obvious that, before the blackhole started taking it apart, people had been living there who now needed to be rescued.

Less than a week later Kuldar sent me this, and we were done. We were incredibly pleased with his work, how fast he had done it and just the overall quality of the piece.

Just gorgeous. With this in hand and some guidance from my Father on what he wanted, I created a very simple cover for his book thus:

I don’t think we could be happier with the results. Now we are looking forward to creating a cover for Special Metal.