This year, we had a lot of great entries (again) for our cover contest. It was quite difficult to select one for the cover. In fact, the jurors were rather split in their decision... we had title nominations for no less than five pieces (and two more almost made it on this short-list).
After a lot of discussion, we decided to go with the following:
Ashanti (tiger on flying carpet) will be the cover;
Changer the Elder (trickster with hourglass) will be the back cover.
The final decision was based on recognizeability, topic, presentation, and dynamics. But the truth is that all of the shortlisted pieces would have been quite worthy of a cover; unfortunately, we have only one con book available and cannot do variants.
This ruling nonwithstanding, we will try to include as many of the participating images in full color in the con book as possible.
Thanks to all artists for participating! I'm sure it will be a fabulous con book this year!