The Cover

The cover for To Orion and Back came into being throughout the course of working on illustrations for individual poems. Originally the author, Joey Mannino, and I talked about it being abstract. However, as the other illustrations came into being I wanted to feature the character Caleb, who shows up in several poems throughout the book.
To do this I decided to use one of the illustrations I'd made for the poem Chelicerae. By editing out the second figure I was able to play with a different range of emotion and initially gave Caleb a halo to highlight what I had read as a quality of tragic heroism. Ultimately, I thought it made the piece too loud and didn't think it fit the overall aesthetic I had created with the other illustrations.