Redesigning a cover for Their Lordships Request has been an interesting excursion into graphic design. Working long distance with a designer in New Zealand makes for some challenges, but has also been educational and exciting. Kura has taken the materials I've sent her, added some elements of her own and come up with four exciting designs. Two of these include the "face" of "Harry" the hero of the book.
The picture has had to be 'doctored' slightly - his neckcloth should be black to start with - and then inserted into a background. I hope to reveal the final result here soon!
I have to say that working with this young man was a real pleasure. He regarded the whole exercise as an enormous joke to be enjoyed to the full and he was also interested in the background to the story and the history behind it. One of the biggest 'in' jokes for us all is that Lukas is German and will appear as the 'face' of Harry Nelson-Heron, a British/Irish Midshipman of the late 18th/ early 19th Century on the finished cover ...
Mind you, at the time the "Harry" part of this book is set, Britain was working to forge a fragile alliance with the Baltic States, including Mecklenburg, Brandenburg and Prussia. Eventually the intervention of the Prussians under Field Marshall Blücher at Waterloo would seal the fate of Napoleon and his ambitions for a French Empire of Europe. History is sometimes far more intricately woven than the finest fiction.