The Dominators

As ever with the black-and-white stories, one of the main choices when composing my covers is what colours to use. I've only ever seen a fuzzy colour photo of a Quark taken at an early exhibition of Doctor Who props, and never one of the Dominators' costumes, so I felt I had a free reign to give them whatever colours I felt suited the illustration. I didn't want a dull metal grey for the Quarks (which is what I suspect they were) so went for an earthy-toned green with complementing golden panels on their heads. This gave the colour scheme for the whole composition - sandy yellows and greeny browns. I gave the bricks of the testing centre a little purple to differentiate them from the landscape and some red in the dark 'flappy' bits of the Dominators' uniforms, although these were knocked back rather when I applied an overall greenish tint at the end to tie all the elements together.

The composition itself was straightforward, having always liked the shot of the Quarks operating their drill. I had hoped to replace the one with his back to us with another shot but couldn't find any other than those from a high angle of Quarks in the quarry. I originally thought to have the drill glowing a bright pink, but opted for an electric blue in the end, and thought it'd be nice to have it actually burning a hole in the ground. The background of the testing building and sand dunes was formed from four or five images in the end. The main change to my rough design was in the Dominators. There's a good shot of Rago looming as he peers into one of the Dulcian travel capsules that I had thought would fit the space well, but with just him isolated looked a little awkward. So I went for a more straightforward 'glowering' pose, fairly late on adding Toba behind him - well, the title is in the plural. Finally, hidden behind the logo is the Dominator spaceship, as the DVD photo gallery had some good shots of the model I hadn't seen before.

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