Heheh... Pretty scatterbrained, but this was an interesting cover to do, came about relatively last-minute straight from Martin. This particular chapter has some interesting angles to it we can't quite sum up until we get into the grit of it. That tends to be the hard issue with covers; when we don't want to reveal the plot straight-up and have to be coy (Wasted On The Blue comes to mind).
Martin came up with this little way of indirectly focusing on Jake. My favorite touch is all of the pictures; they're designed to look like something a parent would take of their kids. Jake isn't IN any of those pictures but it's made clear he's the one that TOOK the pictures. Grant and Jenny holding awards, Lore taking a nap, Andy hanging upside down, Valerie getting caught tickling Nicky, they're all very cute, sweet moments. ^^ So much so that he pinned them over what appears to be a treasure map.
That picture of Vespi was taken from the Anniversay picture... Weird to say that the whistle is something that actually DOES factor into future plans?
Sort of funny, this was kind of conceived as a quick, easy cover, but we just sort of wound up adding more and more to it. I actually did a significant chunk of it myself, offhand know I did the guitar, the whistle, the Vespi picture, the wall itself, and the album cover, plus the coloring and the like.
So yeah, sort of gives some loose idea of what's coming with this chapter I guess, but it's also kind of vague about specifics; this is sort of a reestablishing the status quo kind of chapter but is going to be moving some things forward and serving as something of an epilogue to the previous story arc while we're at it. Kind of no idea how long it's going to be because there's a lot of ground to cover with it but it'll probably be jumping around a lot.
Might notice the shot of Stickset in the corner. Unlike usual with Blues that isn't directly lifted from a previous page but was instead drawn for this one look we do with the corner box in Wright as Rayne; that might be the standard going forward, the preview box thing for Blues kind of worked better back when pages were drawn much further in advance but this format's kind of better for just giving a hint at what's to come going forward. In this case someone we haven't seen since... Well, actually, not that long ago, she was in the filler for Wasted on the Blue.
Martin came up with this little way of indirectly focusing on Jake. My favorite touch is all of the pictures; they're designed to look like something a parent would take of their kids. Jake isn't IN any of those pictures but it's made clear he's the one that TOOK the pictures. Grant and Jenny holding awards, Lore taking a nap, Andy hanging upside down, Valerie getting caught tickling Nicky, they're all very cute, sweet moments. ^^ So much so that he pinned them over what appears to be a treasure map.
That picture of Vespi was taken from the Anniversay picture... Weird to say that the whistle is something that actually DOES factor into future plans?