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Nuts & Bolts: Irene Gallo

September 10, 2008 This weeks Nuts & Bolts interviewee is Irene Gallo, art director for Tor and Forge. I asked her about her work on Jay Lake's Escapement (Tor, June 2008), the sequel to Mainspring (Tor, June 2007).

Genreville: At what stage in the process did you encounter Escapement or the ideas behind it? What drew you to it?

Irene Gallo: My first exposure to Escapement was, typically, from the editor--in this case, Beth Meacham. I remember the first conversation we had about this series because1) she was particularly impassioned about the book and the author, 2) I had just met Jay Lake at a convention--a glancing meeting, but enough that I was able to put a person behind the book, and 3) it was sure to be a cool image. She described Mainspring a bit and mentioned a dirigible coming up to a “spine” on the planet.

GV: What challenges did you face with the artwork?

IG: The only problem when you have a book with something like a dirigible is knowing that so many artists would do something really cool with it. It can be oddly paralyzing. (Although certainly better than the opposite problem!) After a while, I settled on Stephan Martiniere. He has such a great sense of scale and he his style is so conducive to a science-fantasy feel. He seemed the right choice.

On Escapement, in particular, the trouble is doing something similar enough that people connect it as a series but dissimilar enough that people don’t think they have already read it.

GV: How did it inspire or discourage you? How is that experience affecting your current and future projects?

IG: I’'m not at all superstitious, and yet there does seem to be such a thing as an author’'s cover karma. When you get one good cover for an author, it seems more probable the rest will be good. When we got Jay’'s next series in house, Green, I was worried that we wouldn’t live up to these covers. Happy to say, Dan Dos Santos did an awesome job of Green.

Next week's Nuts & Bolts will feature Jason B. Sizemore, publisher of Apex Book Company, discussing Michael A. Burstein's I Remember the Future.

Posted by Rose Fox on September 10, 2008 | Comments (1)