I've been working steadily over the past couple of months to produce Bob Blunt's latest book. It's a travel fiction novel - or 'faction' as Bob prefers to describe it, following the experiences of Don Laridis, an Aussie who decamps to South Korea in need of a change. The story is kind of a travelogue and subtle expose on a foreign lands unfamiliar nuances and moral fabric. The character has thrown himself into a new career as a teacher, and things don't work out quite as he planned. He finds himself caught up in a tale centred around the apparently quite intense and ultimately ruthless private education racket.

It's a good read. Vivid, dialogue-driven, it has great pace and the over-arching tone, while not sinister certainly conveys a sort of scuzzy or at least sheen-less perspective on this particular world. To this end I needed to convey a similar vibe in the art.

I was commissioned for the jacket, typesetting, overall design and to manage the publishing, but also to create some custom illustrations to punctuate the prose - around twenty in total. I opted for a quite stripped-down distressed look, to help convey the 'tarnished' characters and experiences described in the book. There are a couple of fairly surreal passages in there too, so a darkly humorous edge was also required. The jacket and endpapers have spot illustrations lifting out key imagery from the narrative and for the cover itself I went for a classic device; placing a head front and centre - we are following a man's personal voyage of discovery and change. The colour palette draws not only on the Korean flag (it's a travel novel after all), but also some of the wonderful vibrant neon shades so loved in S.Korean traditional dress and cultural iconography. I think the results are great, Bob's pleased anyway (!)