Or the ceaseless quest for that perfect image.

As it had already happened a few months ago when I published Prince at War, I hit the button to release Elios into the Amazon wild with a temporary cover. The image I wanted had the wrong measures and wouldn’t fit the required parameters.

The preliminary stock images I bought for the cover:

 

Temporary Cover:

Image I wanted in the first place:

Alessandro Fiorini, my cover artist and miracle worker sent me a mix of the two:

I decided I had bothered Alessandro enough already, opened Corel Painter and added the lapis lazuli accent to Elios’s eyes, plus a little bit of turquoise here and there on the sky.

The end…?