FEATURED ON THE POLISH STEPHEN KING FAN SITE STEPHENKING.PL : Feb 08

www.stephenking.pl

* Below is the original interview in English. The full interview has been translated into Polish for their website.

SKPL: Could you tell something about yourself? How long do you design graphics and book covers? How you became covers author? And what was your first graphics?

VC: I've been doing book cover art for about 3 years now, though it was in late 2003/04 after I'd graduated from my Graphic Design course at University, that I first started to try to get work as a freelance illustrator. There were many different areas that I thought my art would be suitable for, and book covers was one of them, so I started contacting various publishers about my art to see if they had any projects for me, and as I started to get work, other publishers saw my art and became interested, and it took off from there. Some of the images that I created while I was at university, or in my own time, appeared in various magazines early on, but the first images I had published, which I'd been specifically asked to create, were my illustrations for Joe Hill's short story 'You Will Hear the Locust Sing', which appeared in the magazine 'The 3rd Alternative' (which is now called 'Black Static'). This led to one of my first book cover commissions, as Joe then asked for me to do the cover for his collection '20th Century Ghosts' which was first published here by PS Publishing.

SKPL: In Poland you are known for couple of months only. Readers from our country know you for Stephen King books and his son's Joe Hill novel. What your other works were released in the world? Did you do books covers only or maybe graphics in magazines and comics too?

VC: I've had a lot of work published in the UK and America. A lot of it has been for book covers but I've also created art for magazines, CD covers, websites and even some online games and a book trailer (You can see all the different work I've done on my website portfolio: www.vincentchong-art.co.uk). In the future, as well as more book covers, I'd like to do more work for CD covers and comic covers, which I've not done yet.

SKPL: What technics do you use? How the process of creating graphics looks like? Do you use parts of older graphics or some previously not used ideas?

VC: I create all my final artwork digitally but I use a lot of other techniques as well. I use a lot of photography but also use some painting and drawing, create my own textures with different materials, and sometimes even make sculptural elements which I then scan or photograph and import into my computer to incorporate into the artwork. I've built up a stock library of many photos and textures over time, so some of these I'll re-use in different images. First I always start by coming up with an idea and have a picture of how I want the final image to look in my head, and then I'll do a very quick rough sketch which I'll use as a guide. As I'm usually illustrating specific stories, I'll come up with new ideas that relate directly to the story I'm working on.

SKPL: Is it often that the publisher don't accept your cover? What is happening with it in such case?

VC: I've never had any of my covers rejected by the publisher. Sometimes, they'll ask me to make some little changes in the way something looks, but I've always been happy to do this, and it's often resulted in the image working better than it did. As I always send my ideas and rough sketchs first to the publisher or author, and get approval from them of my idea before I start work on the final art, I think there's less chance of anything being rejected. It's always important to me that the publisher and author are happy with my work, as they are the clients, so I'm always open to suggestions and like to work with them on projects.

SKPL: Do you read Stephen King in your private life or is your contact with his books limited to your work only?

VC: When I was younger I read a lot of Stephen King and was a big fan, but I'd not read any of his work for quite a while until I started doing these covers and started to read his books again. It was great reading them again as it's reminded me of how much I enjoyed his books, and as I was a big fan of his work, I was really excited that I now had the opportunity to do covers for his books. When I was younger and reading his books, I had not yet thought I'd be an artist for book covers, let alone be able to do covers for Stephen King!

SKPL: How do you create Stephen King covers? Do you get a description what it should be like or do you have carte blanche? Maybe you read description or synopsis of the book?

VC: Proszynski i S-ka have been really good and let me have the creative freedom to come up with ideas myself for what to do for the covers. I always send over a rough sketch first though, to make sure they are happy with my idea. Even though I've been familiar with a lot of the stories I've done covers for, or may have even read some of them before, I like to read the whole book first before I start, rather than just reading a description or synopsis of the book. This helps me to come up with ideas for the art and gives me a better feel of the book and what imagery might be suitable to represent it. When I am doing book covers, if I have time, I do like to read the books first, but there are times when I've been doing covers for other people and they just give me a description of the image they want.

SKPL: Your first King's cover in Poland was 'Shining'. Jack on the cover is similar to Jack Nicholson in movie adaptation of this novel. Man on 'Dead Zone' cover can be associated to John Smith from tv series. Are you sometimes inspired by movie adaptations of King books?

VC: I've seen a lot of the film and tv adaptions of King's work so I like to keep these in mind when doing the covers. Sometimes these images from the films are very well known to people, such as Jack Nicholson in 'The Shining', and when thinking about The Shining, it's hard not to think of him, so I do like to take some inspiration from these as well as the books. But sometimes they change things in the movie adaptations and add things that aren't in the books, which is why I always like to re-read the book first to make sure I don't end up illustrating something that I remembered from a movie adaptation that wasn't in the book. I also like to pay attention to the descriptions of characters in the books and work these in if I can.

SKPL: You do Stephen King covers for not so long but can you already say that you are not satisfied with some cover?

VC: On the whole I've been quite happy with the covers I've done so far. I think with all my work though, I always think there are some things that I could do a bit differently or be done better if I was to do it again or had more time. If I let myself, I could carry on making small changes to an image forever, but this doesn't always make a better image and there's always deadlines to work to. As I've always been a bit of a perfectionist I probably won't ever be 100% completely satisfied with any image I've done.

SKPL: What do you think about your works after years? Are you pleased or maybe you see too many disadvantages?

VC: Looking back at my earlier work I'm still happy at what I achieved at the time but I've developed my techniques and style a lot over the last few years, so it's hard not to see how some things could have been done better, or think about how I would approach doing the same image now.

SKPL: So far we know 8 King covers you did for us (Shining, Dead Zone, Night Shift, Buick 8, Misery, Cujo, Tommyknockers, Firestarter). Can you say which one you like best?

VC: I think my favourite might be the one for Night Shift. Although my favourite changes from time to time... I really liked Dead Zone when I first finished it, but now I prefer the other ones more, and when I first finished Buick 8, I wasn't sure how much I liked it, but now I think the image works well and I'm very happy with it. I'm also really happy with how my latest cover for Firestarter turned out.

SKPL: You create your grapics for the covers. What do you think about final result, after cut to fit book series and with letters? Are you interested in that or you just give the grapics away to the publisher and doesn't care anymore because you don't have nfluence on that?

VC: I've only received the books for Shining, Dead Zone and Buick 8 right now, but I've been very happy with the final results so far. I do prefer to do the type and layout as well as just the artwork if I can, because I can then make sure that the type fits well with the image and that the image is shown in the best way possible. I do the full design and type for some other book covers as some publishers I work for, such as PS Publishing and Subterranean Press, let me do all the cover type as well. Sometimes when other people have added type to my images, I think that I would have done it differently... You can see the covers in which I've done the type design as well as the art, in the 'Design' section of my website. For these King books, I knew from the start that they would add the type themselves and that they would be a similar layout to their previous King books, and I knew the dimensions for the cover, so I would design the images to allow for this and have room at the top and bottom for the type to go on.

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