Home

Authors

Catalog

Fiction Catalog

Here, of course, I'm making the cover for my own book.  This is the 2019 cover.

 

I remembered that I had a slide of an old woman I knew -- Osiropa -- in her finery.

 

I had to make a couple of decisions. One was whether to thoroughly clean the color slide before scanning, and I decided not to. The other was whether to put the subtitle on the cover, which I did do. Smaller issues were whether to let Osiropa's eye sockets go black, which I did because I wanted her face to fade into the background a little. The reason for this is that the mythical Red Woman is, after all, a creature of myth. So I thought I'd better throw a little uncertainty at Osiropa's image.

 

For the 2019 version, I enlarged Osiropa's head, and allowed her feather headdress to spill over onto the spine and part of the back cover. I killed the shadows ever more than I did in 2013, and I saturated the reds more strongly, too.

 

 

Don Mitchell

A Red Woman Was Crying