A. M. Rasmussen
Why have I never talked about the talent behind my covers, the artist A.M. Rasmussen?
She was a friend before she was my cover artist. You see, the thing about being an Indie author is that you look to your friends to help where they can. When I first asked her to help and explained how I wanted my covers to look, like retro travel posters, well…she said she could at least try.
The thing is, A.M. Rasmussen is a naturalist and artist, communicating nature through scientific illustration and nature-inspired creature design.
The flat, 2D art style I was asking for was as far as you could get from her masterful watercolor creations.
A. M. Rasmussen is as amazing a person as she is an artist.
She has a doctoral degree in biology. She works with paleontologists to reconstruct species. (So cool!) She’s done countless installations for the Idaho Museum of Natural History and her work has been featured in scientific magazines.
She’s helped my cover dreams become reality. Ten times over at this point.
In the beginning she asked me to contemplate my books’ future. She made sure the fonts we used were royalty free. (You can find such things on google free fonts.) She helped plan the palette of all my books. (Did you know, there are color elements from Big Trouble in Little Italy in each book?)
Once we figured out how to size covers across various platforms – B&N, IngramSparks and Amazon- we started to have fun.
She started hiding secrets in the covers. Surviving Thirty has a hidden jaguar and quetzal. Let it Snow has a moose. And the stars on A Simple Avalanche are Altair and Vega, two lovers separated by a river in the night sky.
I was talking to her about the upcoming book whose main character is an artist. We talked about art definitions and what could inspire the character’s artwork. While talking, A.M. Rasmussen used the term Modern and Postmodern art. So it was a great time to ask about the difference.
“Modern art is the last part of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It’s a time when all these famous artist were breaking away from the traditional approaches and using new techniques. Postmodern art is dated after the second world war.”
I then asked her if there was a name for the art that was being made today.
“For me, this time that we’re living in now, in art history, is more about the availability of art to the masses. And when I say the masses, I mean the masses of artists that are creating art now, and how available it is not only to create, but how available it is to get their art out into the world. Which is something that has never been available until our modern ages.
Even during the Modern art era, people were really constricted by who could show work and when they could show it and who talked about it. But that’s not true with our present day art; so there’s no one movement. For example, people who are doing sketches of anime characters online can get the same amount of precedence as a famous illustrator putting out a new book. This is the cool part about what’s happening now and why we don’t really have one art movement to define what’s happening. If I had to define it, I would call it something like ‘The art of the masses,’ because the masses are making the art how they want.”
Talk about chills.
Last year, one of my pet projects came full circle. I asked (lovingly forced) A.M. Rasmussen to work with me on a novella called The Museum Guide.
I explained my vision, how amazing it would be if each section of the book had a sketch that represented the area of the museum the characters were in.
She was on board and let me tell you, her sketches elevated the novella. And when I formatted the book, I made sure it would be printed on white paper so her sketches would stand out.
I am so proud of what we created.
Find A.M. Rasmussen here: