Digital artist Larry Rostant‘s photo Domestic Goddess is a cheery, mutated vision of 1950s femininity. It’s great in so many ways: concept, lighting, execution. The bounce light and shadows from arm to arm sell it. Rostant is as much a digital illustrator as a digital photographer, a go-to guy for photo-based fantasy, crime and historical fiction cover art. He does romance novel covers, he does naval history book covers, and he hit the career jackpot doing a 2003 revamp of the Game of Thrones covers before GoT had become a thing beyond its initial fandom. His Art Directors hail from HarperCollins, Voyager, Angry Robot, and Orbit. His process is entirely 21st century:
I build an image out of lots and lots of bits of different photographs. In any cover, there could be up to 50 different images put together. For instance, if it was a picture of someone running down a hill, I’d use different bits of hair, different bits of arms and different bits of fingers all put together to create the quintessential perfect representation of someone running down a hill. ~ An Interview with Larry Rostant, Mike Shackle, Fantasy Faction.
To pull this off seamlessly — blending dramatic light, shadow, skin color, artifacts, environmental color, digits — is a craft requiring a strong sense of anatomy and an intense preciseness. Over the years he’s acquired a large client base that implicitly trusts him to deliver technical excellence. Do a Google image search. There are a lot of covers.
