As some of you may or may not know, The Blackening is my first completed novel, and – to this day – remains my only finished novel. It’s a brutal, uncompromising look at how the scars of racism haunt the protagonist as he slowly unravels the terrible truth behind a school shooting.
Tha Blackening is both a labor of love and hate for me. While I still believe it is the best work I’ve ever written, I also dumped two-plus years of emotional heartache and loss into those characters and the unholy horrors they face. Along the way, I somehow wrote a deeply poetic yet hopelessly suicidal – almost nihilistic – reflection of society.
The novel contains four pieces of artwork that I penciled, each one representing the four parts that the story is split into. I will have to modify them in order to remove potential spoilers, but I will post them sometime later on. Firstly, here is the scanned image of my rough sketch for the cover:
Since I have the IQ of a dusty broom when it comes to digital imaging, my good friend (and the Madman of Manchester, England) Tim Sinclair stepped in. Working from my sketch idea, he started a new image in Photoshop and built it up from there:
Pssst…that’s Tim himself as the cover “models.” Many thanks go to Tim for working on it and putting up with copious amounts of my constructive criticisms and suggestions as he went along.
Unfortunately, due to Tim’s time constraints, I haven’t been able to work with him further as I would like; he really is a swell guy and it was a joy working alongside him. I have several pencil sketches of promotional artwork for The Blackening – as well as those aforementioned interior pieces – that just need a little love in Photoshop. Here’s a sampling of these pieces:
Anybody I know willing to lend their Photoshopping skills, I pay a reasonable rate of gratitude…because it’s all I can afford.
When I feel inspired enough to do so (AKA a little less lazy), I’ll post an excerpt from The Blackening.
Daryl Brownell's Domain of the Disturbing 