In 2018, two young authors approached me to design a cover for their publication. The authors were looking for a depiction of two children perceiving various iterations of extremism from a distance; a distance which would be reinforced and made safe through the aid of education, and educational material. Extremism is manifold and varied, but in this case was to be depicted as human catastrophe, terrorism, and environmental devastation.

For this project I chose to do away with the initial idea of vanishing point perspective, since the portrait orientation of the cover would cram all the elements in the background into a tight space. Instead, I opted for a flattened perspective in order to make full use of the cover space and order the elements into a vertical hierarchy. Various schools of miniature painting (Mughal, Persia, Ottoman, but also Orthodox traditions) make use of non-vanishing point perspectives and often favour verticality in images. The miniature style is also apparent in the shading of the scene. Initially I worked on paper and then Illustrator, but I needed more flexibility with brushes and shading, so I progressed to Photoshop and worked with a Wacom tablet.