One of the things I now enjoy the most about publishing an e-book on the Internet, is creating cover art for the books, with the help of young artists on DeviantArt, a website and an organization that supports artists.
Helen & Sharon is a book that recounts the story of how Helen starred in several hit movies masquerading as a new young talent, Sharon Vuehl.
When I first published H & S, I just threw together a cover picture depicting an Amazon (from a sculpture), as well as a picture of the goddess Saraswati (also from a sculpture), since Sharon Vuehl's co-star, Sita Maunder, was a devout believer in the goddess.
It was well past time to replace this placeholder with an appropriate piece of cover art, and when the artist whose work I prefer announced that she had some free time, I described what I wanted. She had it ready within a couple of weeks (which is very fast indeed), and here it is:
What's going on here?
On the left we have Helen, perhaps a few months after her little boy James was born, dressed for a concert, holding a baton. Presumably she is about to conduct the performance of an orchestral work.
On the right, we have a depiction of Sharon Vuehl in her role of Merit, the principal character in the most high-grossing movie in which Sharon starred, namely Merit and the Princess. Merit is a high-born young woman in a society in which the coming-of-age ritual has the girl going on an adventure, leading a team of women warriors. Merit and her band are skilled fighters, and in the picture, Merit is in a fighting crouch, ready to take on some antagonist that is not visible to us.
According to the story, Helen secretly trains and exercises, to build muscle, and her disguise involves straightening her curly blonde hair, and having it colored red. Sharon Vuehl, when she goes into the studio, looks both more muscular, and younger than Helen, and has blue eyes and red hair.
The artist was instructed to make the two figures plausibly the same woman, except for the blue eyes and the musculature. We would expect that Helen's disguise made it impossible to recognize Sharon as being Helen, whereas in the artwork, Helen and Sharon had to look convincingly the same person.
Kay Hemlock Brown
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