WEAPONS! Where might one go to procure something if  …  say… you wanted to reenact the Knights of the Round Table, or Edward James Olmos in Miami Vice*, or find an axe for the cover of Daniel Abrahan’s THE KING’S BLOOD? You go to Weapons Specialists in downtown (or downton if you want to be chi chi) Manhattan. Which is what I did one blistering hot day last summer. Check out the video of my visit and revel in the fact that the folks who work there have THE BEST JOB in the world. I would like to apologize in advance for the rather large sweat stains I’m sporting in the video. It’s like my armpits had a pool party the rest of the body wasn’t invited to. So… yea.

I had very specific details for the axe and the final weapon needed to scream warrior. In other words, the axe needed to look used. Obviously this combination of elements isn’t something that you just find off the interwebs, so I needed to create the final image from composites of multiple weapons.

After leaving Weapon’s Specialists with a rifle case full of medieval cutlery, which by the way is really surreal carrying through Grand Central, I needed to photograph everything and start working on what you see on the final book. Here are the weapons I got to play with.

 

Eric Westpheling was brought in to photograph everything. He was familiar with the project since he also shot, directed, and edited the video you just saw.

The dragon detail was surprisingly the most difficult thing to find which ultimately came from a stock photo of a dragon from the Dragon Bridge in Slovenia.

Once we all felt we had the weapon of choice, I plugged it into the background and did some final retouching to get the final cover. Click on the image below to see an animated gif of the process.

*There was that one episode of Miami Vice when Ed rocked a samurai sword because, hey, that totally made sense at the time.