Casper Pham

Neon Requiem Book Cover Art (process)

Added 2024-10-27 14:36:04 +0000 UTC

This was my recent client-commissioned cover illustration for the yet unpublished Asian-centered cyberpunk anthology Neon Requiem. Quite proud of how this turned out! It's quite a busy piece with a lot of elements, so I pushed myself to fall back on detail in some key places (the shadowed area at the top with the police officers). I was very eager to provide a very Vietnamese take on a genre typically dominated by a Western or Japanese perspective.

Out of all the thumbnails I came up with, this final one I ended up with probably had the most compelling story. Typically cyberpunk has a heavy emphasis on crime and law enforcement, and I wanted an excuse to illustrate that divide in power with a huge, terrifying police-elephant automaton and a little canary airbike. I've always loved the war elephants depicted in old Vietnamese woodblock prints, how intimidating and beautiful they were with their too-human, all-knowing eyes. The idea to give the police-elephant a lacquered surface came from the classical Vietnamese practice of using lacquered wood with mother-of-pearl inlay as a decorative element too (the reference I used is pictured below).

You can see how there's a lot of tonal variation in the inlay, I realize it would have been too distracting to incorporate that into the piece so I left the pattern quite bare. I feel perhaps this is yet another skill issue I have yet to overcome (sweatdrop).