The Invasion of Time

While waiting to get hold of the right images for my 'Black Orchid' cover I wasn't idle and managed to get both 'The Invasion of Time' and 'The Invisible Enemy' done, helped by the fact that 'Invasion of Time' was pretty straightforward in the end. The focus on Stor was a given really - I don't worry too much about giving away certain surprises as this is a 30-year-old TV show and anyone using my covers is more than likely to be aware of the returning bad guys. Having said that, I did begin with a version featuring a helmeted Stor (as that's how the photo I used had him) but decided that, because all my other Sontaran story covers showed their ugly mugs, then this one might as well. Fortunately the only decent close-up of Stor I could find fitted the angle of the body shot, so replacing helmet with head was relatively simple.

Castellan Kelner is the main humanoid villain so I wanted him on there (and he's not someone who appears on many other people's covers) and I was able to get a good scan from an old DWM of him looking over his shoulder, which nicely mirrored the shot of the Doctor I wanted to use. It would have been nice to have a face-on shot of Stor between them, as though they were both turning in surprise at his appearance, but I didn't have that shot and the design of my cover template required Stor to be more over to the right. I had also thought of having the Sontaran smaller and more clearly standing in the Doctor's lead-lined office, with my take on a shimmering Vardan behind him, but the layout again really needed Stor to dominate the remaining space behind the two front figures. And besides it saved me a lot of time recreating the cog wall carvings from multiple photos, as in the end I just needed one main shot of them with a second used to fill in a few gaps.

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