Delta and the Bannermen
2 August 2009Phew! What a hectic couple of months I've had, and sadly keeping my covers up to date was what had to give. Things have quietened down now (until the next emergency arises), however, so I'm hoping to quickly get back on track. What I don't want to do, though, is compromise the quality of my covers just to hit some arbitrary release date - I hope you agree a delay is better than a rushed cover, but I'll try to keep that delay down to a reasonable time.
As it happens, the distractions of real life came at a time when I wasn't feeling particularly inspired. 'Delta and Bannermen' is one of my all-time turkeys, I'm afraid, and I wasn't looking forward to doing a cover for a story I really don't connect with. Even though there are plenty of photos from the serial, none of them particularly sparked my imagination. I did find a moody shot of the Doctor I liked on Tragical History Tour; it was tightly cropped on the left, though, and I couldn't find another copy in print to scan, so was forced to position him on the far left of my cover. I also had to break with my style of featuring just the villains on my covers (give or take the occasional companion) as, given the title of the story, Delta really had to feature alongside her pursuing Bannermen.
I initially tried two horizontal panels: Gavrok and the Bannermen on top with an escaping Delta and Chimeron below. It felt too similar to my recent 'Deadly Assassin' cover, though (despite the fact they'd be far apart once on the shelf), and the bottom panel didn't have enough going on to fill the space. So I decided to split Gavrok and his Bannermen into separate circular panels. This also limited the amount of cutting out I needed to do - just a bit around Delta to add in an explosion going off behind her. This left more of the background exposed, but not enough to use an image of much detail as most would be hidden. A screengrab of the opening frame of the story fitted well.
Download the final DELTA AND THE BANNERMEN cover here