Vera Packard was originally a concept for a "ghost hunter," but as can be seen in Sheppard's Ghosts that idea went by the way. I did, however, still have those early photographs, and decided one evening to craft something with one of them. The result is thus:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As described in Elements of a Book Cover, I sometimes turn to Pittsburgh to supply the background images in these illustrations. The buildings shown under attack above are in a photograph taken from the top level of a parking deck on Penn Avenue in the Cultural District of downtown Pittsburgh. As the 'burgh's economy has fluctuated since the end of the massive steel mill era, it has accumulated a strange mixture of older and newer buildings, either of which can be utilized as stand-ins for, well, just about anywhere my imagination wants to go, once the specific context is removed. Although it doesn't show much any longer as there is a fireball in the way, there is a very modern glass and steel building in this photo, which was one of the reasons I chose it; it just didn't survive enough to be seen in the finished image. However, the older facades visible did sway my thinking about the way the rest of the series' covers would be constructed.
The same camera vantage supplied the buildings for the Hamish Riordan cover Unwarrented Actions, and the snapshot of Vera Packard on the back cover of Resurgence.