With little to no budget for props and location (flying to Turkey or Greece was out of the question) I was assigned the cover for Prestwick House's public domain title of Homer's The Iliad.

The challenge was to inexpensivley create a cover which high school students could identify with. Although started before the movie 300 hit the screens, the tie-in will definitly help sales of the book to teachers wanting to teach this classic story.

I started with finding a room in my house where the natural light gave me the effect i was looking for. I then researched and molded a Greek spearhead out of Scuptly clay and glued it to a large wooden dowel rod. I located a great Greek era helmet on eBay and used the BUY NOW feature to snag it for a measley $50.00! An old red sheet, plastic sword ($7.99), vinyl arm bands which I cut and adjusted to fit ($3.00) completed my prop requirements.

Early on a sun-lit winter morning when no one was home, I set up my camera on a tripod in my southern-facing bedroom and used the 10 second timer feature on the digital camera to begin snapping away roughly 30 images in various poses. I then transfered 2 or 3 of these into Photoshop and combined them with selected images from my extensive personal collection of stock photos. Adding a few public domain greek god images of statues I then assembeled all the photos into a number of compositions to use on the front and back covers, frontispiece and chapter headings.

The cover was well received and is currently at the printer with a release date of May 2007.

Update: Shelby sez, "Stanley Lombardo, a classics professor at the University of Kansas, published a translation of the Iliad, and the company put on the cover this way awesome, genius and bizarre picture of the D-Day invasion at Normandy."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:32:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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