The call to attend my mother after her fall caught me in the middle of my book cover assignment for the second of the Christopher Stasheff "Warlock" series, "The Warlock Heretical." I packed up my laptop and my mini-Wacom "Bamboo" tablet and brought them into the old family house where I set up my studio on the dining room table. Even during the sad days after my mom's passing I was able to work on it, one hour at a time, until I finished it and sent it off to the clients, brought to them by the Warlock-magic of Internet.
Here is the cover as completed. The top half with the realistic clouds is blank because that is where the writing goes. I did a lot of research into fourteenth-century knights to get this looking suitably Medieval.
The story of the book, set on another world where magic works and civilization is preserved on a medieval level, is that a rogue Abbot, egged on by an evil outside agitator, declares himself an Archbishop of a schismatic church separated from the legitimate rule of the Pope. The hero, here on his black robotic horse, must stop the schism (or heresy) from happening, ultimately engaging in single combat with the Archbishop on the battlefield, as depicted here.
I have always wondered whether a situation like this is heresy or schism, or both. I thought that heresy involved a difference or wrongness of belief, while schism was a political sectarian breakaway from a rightful church authority. I suppose you don't get one without the other, that if you are a heretic you have automatically separated yourself from the mainstream church, and if you are a schismatic you already believe something different from the mainstream church's teaching. But I suppose "The Warlock Schismatic" doesn't sound so dramatic.
Photoshop over a pencil drawing, 12 1/2" x 16", October 2015. Clicquez for larger view.
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