After reading the book, I realised that the cover did not display any visual hints about the
story other than the imagery of the sea, which was already mentioned in the title of the book.
The original cover is attractive, but I wanted to make the cover art more expressive. I started with a few crude
concept sketches, and eventually settled on this layout. The book is about a crew on a whaleship that battled
the cruelty of the sea and the wrath of the whales they harvested oil from.
The scan was used as a template to produce the graphic in Illustrator.
This is a scan from the inside of the book that shows sketches of the ships drawn by one of the whaleship voyagers. The large one in the backgroud is the main ship, the whaleship "Essex." The three smaller boats were used to immobilize the whale and harvest the oil. The small ships would be attached to the main ship until a whale was spotted. I used the small whaling boats as the basis for the boat in my final cover.
