Fallen Ribbon Cover Reveal
Welcome to another post of the Dark Nursery Diaries, as I had mentioned in previous social media posts, today has finally come that we are revealing the cover of my long anticipated first novel, Fallen Ribbon. Before we get into the reveal, I just wanted to talk about the process of deciding on the cover art and how we got to this point.
When I first thought of the title Fallen Ribbon, it came to me as a symbol of who Geordie Vollner is and where she comes from. The term, “Fallen” is often used in the context of an angel who, so-to-speak, fell from grace or heaven in a religious connotation. I thought this was very befitting of Geordie given her hybrid lineage of being mixed with vampire. Her parents fell from the graces of their communities to have her, and by extension, she is predestined to be fallen in the eyes of her kinship, to put it nicely. In the perspective of the angelic community, she’s so far beyond fallen, she’s so far beyond redemption, she was born as an abomination and therefore cannot be picked back up again. Her mere vampiric nature makes her essentially untouchable. No angel would sully their hands to save her from her dark nature.
I didn’t want this to be the only aspect of Geordie, however, I needed her to be on some level multifaceted in how the world around her views her. Despite being a pariah, fallen from grace and disgraced in the eyes of the world, those eyes still view her as this beautiful fragile creature. Her physical features are unworldly and everything about her genetic makeup is unconventional. She has the best of both worlds as far as beauty in angels and vampires are concerned, and that makes her intimidating to others. She doesn’t see herself as necessarily beautiful or ugly, she merely is, while the rest of the world sees her as this delicate beautiful “thing” that has never been able to hone into her powers. The world views her as a creature of chaos.
I view ribbons in a similar way to how I view Geordie. We use them for many things, they’re incredibly multifunctional in the way we use them to tie things together, but regardless, they are an accessory to the bigger picture… or gift in this case. Most often we use ribbon to wrap our gifts in and make things more beautiful. We put ribbons on birthday presents, Christmas trees; you can even put a ribbon on a puppy, and it is infinitely cuter! There’s no denying it! Ribbons make everything appear so much prettier! But you always want to make sure to securely tie your ribbons or else the wrong tug in the wrong direction and it falls apart. They look may look and feel dainty with the delicate touch they add to the objects we wrap them around, but they can be strong and bring things together perfectly if you know how to use them in just the right way. So that is where I came up with the term, “Ribbon” in the title.
Now to incorporate this into the cover, I wanted the artwork for my first big writing project to be straightforward but still symbolic. Initially I wanted the background to be dark with light illuminating the angel, but it just wasn’t working despite trying it in different mediums and unfortunately, I learned that it’s not something people want to see in an Urban Fantasy Supernatural Fiction novel. We ultimately decided to make it more colorful and flashy despite my unwavering objections, and so we decided to appeal to the people and use a cityscape of Boston as the background with a red overlay that I just love. It initially wasn’t my first thought to use the color red, but multiple people suggested a red background would fit the book well and I loved the idea.
We were really struggling the idea of incorporating a ribbon into the cover and ultimately decided on using some magical wispies instead which turned out to be a sort of blue color and to add I decided to put in some blue fire since it fit the motif of the story as well. Putting all the different aspects of the cover together, I love how it all came together, thanks to my graphic designer, Stephanie Wilcinski!
When Steph and I were going over my desires for the artwork, I wanted to make sure it was clearly thematic to the story of being dark and simple. I also wanted to keep the design concept as an open simple idea that could be worked on to do iterations for the future subsequent books of the series. Because that was the original intent of the book, for it to be a series. I knew going into writing this story that it would never be able to be wrapped up in just one book, and I’m happy for that. It gives me a lot of room to work with its development.
Please, don’t forget to Like and Follow my author Facebook page, T.J. Vasquez, and my twitter page @fallenribbon to keep up to date with Launch Campaign news! My blog posts have now increased to every Monday, Wednesday and Thursday!
Thank you for reading, and now for the cover art for Fallen Ribbon!
