How many different cover designs did you create for The Silent Patient ? Related article: Alex Michaelides, Author of The Silent Patient, on Writing the Perfect ThrillerĤ. I particularly like how the threads aligned with the details of her blowing hair in the end. The details made the difference and everyone was excited about this direction, so we had the same canvases professionally shot. The raw canvases that I stretched myself many years earlier were worn naturally with time: threads hung frayed at the edges and the staples binding wood and cloth were lightly rusted and placed in a way that only a human hand can master. It was simply a case of photographing some initial tests, which I did with my iPhone on my deck, and then showing initial designs for another round of feedback. I’m a painter by training, so I actually have a lot of past paintings and stretched canvases at my house. Thankfully, the pivot was not too difficult to make as we were still in initial designs. He was right, of course - and I agreed we should be more authentic to the story. He liked the direction, but suggested we move towards canvas instead, as the heroine paints with oils, not watercolor. With The Silent Patient, we showed my early designs that featured a series of torn watercolor papers to Alex, the author. How did input from the book’s author inform the cover’s aesthetic?
The Greek tragedy Alcestis is an underlying theme of the book.ģ. I initially envisioned torn paper revealing the word “Silent.” I ripped some watercolor paper in a way that unfurled to reveal first the word “Silent” and then a bust of a Greek goddess’s mouth much like Alcestis’s. What was your initial vision for the cover of The Silent Patient ? Eventually, the idea for a painting of a woman with some damage to it kept resurfacing for me.Ģ. I kept thinking, however, I still wanted to allude to painting, perhaps through some other means. I could have tried to replicate the paintings as described in the book but felt that there needed to be some room for the reader’s imagination through the author’s words. I found myself drawn to continue exploring painting as a theme for the design.
In The Silent Patient, the protagonist is a painter. As such, the production used a special stock that resembled canvas and a high gloss lamination was used over the painted type to attain a linseed oil quality. The protagonist is an up-and-coming art dealer and the story is an observation of the art world in the late 1990s.
I dealt with something similar once before, when I designed a cover for Steve Martin’s novel, An Object of Beauty. Was it a new challenge to design a cover for The Silent Patient, given one of the main characters is an artist?
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