Vanyel & Vixen

 Vanyel & Vixen

Earlier this year I heard from Betsy Wollheim that I had a new cover to do and that it would be simple because we already knew the two characters that would be on the front.  Mercedes Lackey was in the process of writing a new novel with her hero from "The Last Herald Mage" trilogy, Vanyel Askevron, who teams up with a new character, a healer with the name Vixen.  However, apart from these characters and their horses, there was no other outline.  It's common that successful authors to not have the novel written before the art is needed for publicity.  Misty did send me this picture as the inspiration for Vixen, which I loved.  There's a lot of personality there! 

I immediately decided to return to the design format of the original Herald Mage books, the main question being how to fit two figures with horses in the skinny center rectangle. This is led to my thumbnails

Then to drawings for the sketches.  I really liked both ideas (never submit a sketch you don't like, that'll be the one they'll choose) but the idea of Vixen being able to write while riding on Brownie tickled my imagination. The comic in me then thought of Brownie "helping" Vixen.  Vanyel just has to look beautiful and heroic.

Betsy & Misty both preferred the lower sketch, where a serious Vanyel looks off to the distance and Vixen, picking medicinal herbs, looks perplexedly at her horse Brownie (who is a cob), who is either helping her or eating the said herbs. So I sent off the two color sketches below.

They chose the more normal colors of the lower sketch. Since I wasn't going to be able to show characters or incidents from a story still being written, the black borders were filled with a gold swirling design and shields with a V on it for Valdemar. I devised some monsters for the top, and decided camomile was suitable for the lower design to represent Vixen the healer.  I had picked up a beautifully illustrated book in England long ago called "Hedgerow," which showed many plants used by medieval people as cures, and that was going to be inspiration for the foreground.  Misty herself decided on the shield design for Vixen, camomile and a sword.

Unusually for me, I painted the background first, on a separate board.  This was because it's hard to get black paint to photograph or scan a pure and even black, as I learned from digitally fixing the earlier Vanyel files.  I decided to scan this art and then outline every flower in black in Photoshop, the same way I add gold designs to art now.  The printers used to have trouble lighting and photographing gold paint so eventually I started just doing it digitally.

Here is the pencil drawing on the gessoed illustration board.  You can see I had real trouble getting Vixen's expression just right.

I started out with Brownie and then on to Vixen. I think you can guess I'm mostly working with a size 0-1 size brush.  Whatever's cheap and white.

This is what my draughtsman table looks like. Since I had two people, two horses, herbal plants, and mountains, I had piles and piles of reference for this "simple" cover art. It was a constant rotation of pictures culled from the internet and my scrap files - like 40 pages.

Vixen got her Healer's green outfit on, and Brownie got more personality.  I had to work on Vixen's "suffer no fools gladly" face, while the grass grew.

I forgot to say I'm working in acrylics on gessoed illustration board.  With acrylics I work in thin layer after layer of color, sometimes wiping out a layer, like you can see in the high lit part of Brownie's nose. Vixen and Brownie are picking/eating or helping "lungwort for maladies of the lungs" and the foreground has eyebright, sanicle (for inner hurts), fleabane (to drive away fleas and cure dysentery) and greater stitchwort (for relief of stitches!) Yfandes got colored in and Vanyel's face and hands are started but not dark enough. The characters are supposed to be in their 30s.

Vanyel is more finished.  The english actor Michael Praed was my inspiration back then for the face of Vanyel, and of course, now he's a white haired gentleman.  However on the internet, your photos can keep you young forever. 

Brownie and Yfandes finally get their harness put on, and the background is roughed in, harking back to the very first Valdemar book, "Arrows of the Queen." The acid free rag board is curving quite a lot, but a bit of pressing and drying out will take care of that.

All polished up and ready for it's scan into the computer, I added in the gold design layer, the black background (all of which took tedious hours) and the result is below. I reduced the color in the camomile daisies as they were distracting from the center art. I have a very very old Epson scanner that scans the art in pieces, which I then assemble in Photoshop. It works, which is good because I'm 4 hours away from places that do good art photography. Vanyel looks haunted but heroic, Yfandes intelligent, Vixen is obviously thinking "What the heck, Brownie?" and Brownie is thinking either "Yummy" or "Ima helping, yup, I yam."

Thanks for looking through my old fashioned painting plus digital methods of making a book cover!

I can't wait to read (actually I listen to the recordings of) this book.  The contrast of the characters sound like so much fun. Yay Misty! To be published by DAW Books/Astra Publishing in June of 2026.

Jody A Lee

www.jodylee.org