I've attached an image by Oscar Chichoni of Joan of Arc (I presume) which was the direct inspiration for a scene late in the story, where Mira is helped out of her armour after a battle:
The plates clanged to the floor and she groaned, trying and failing to reach the next catch. Scribe helped her with that and another piece fell to the floor. He and another helped her remove her felted undersuit that was stiff and stinking with dried sweat, blood and urine. Patches of it were still wet, and other parts peeled from barely coagulated wounds, tearing half-formed clots and scabs away painfully and making her bleed anew. She was so tired that a sour leaden weight seemed to have soaked through her muscles and into the bones themselves. She hefted one breast, saw the red line on her ribs, saw the fresh trickle, her body hair pasted together by sticky blood. Line crossed line, cut over scar crossed tattoo. Her body was a palimpsest now, so overwritten by wear and learning, so caked with filth. She smelled utterly foul, she thought.
On the subject of nudity:
I think of Meyr in her various incarnations having at all times powerful physical presence, but by no means being a supermodel or centrefold. Those archetypes are in fact far too passive - even in the stereotypical fantasy art genre they don't really have the uncompromising force of personality that she has and still look as they're modeling the latest in brass and fur for Victoria's Secret. The cliche of "brasserie" or combat high heels can be avoided, I think. It is nicely parodied - and transcended - in Peter Chung's Aeon Flux (avoid the film, I mean the Egon Schiele-influenced animated series), but the image by Chichoni plausibly combines sexuality and the representation of practical armour, not to mention telling a story about her history and her followers. So, if sex is to be used (and I have no problem with pictures of attractive women!) along with a realistic representation of Meyr's militant nature, then that image offers an example of the kind of thing that can be done.
However, she does go through a lot of physical changes, representing the state of the Last Redoubt, "big-boned" at her healthiest (I've known a number of women who have been very compelling sexually while being quite overweight according to conventional fashions - it was all about personality and stance), and I was influenced by the Queen in Crowley's The Deep. At other times she's been skeletally-lean (eg. Schiele). Even during the various stages of the Game, her form changes a great deal. There is a lot then to choose from, so I'm not going to dictate a specific body form.
As for her basic appearance... I don't want this to be a rigid template by any means, maybe just a point of departure or even something that can be a "Well, not THAT!" example... I thought of her as being not definitely ectomorphic, though she is emaciated at some points of the narrative. Rather broad-shouldered and -hipped, wide or full mouth, large eyes, wide cheekbones, smallish nose. She's tall by the standards of her society and sometimes plump, but then giving the (accurate) impression of there being a lot of muscle under the fat. She is not of course "butch" or asexual in reaction to the combat stripper archetype, but as the title suggests, very much the representation of a powerful feminine force.
One reference might be Amanda Palmer (now Neil Gaiman's wife, I see). She doesn't exactly meet the description above and I wrote Anima's early drafts well before I'd heard of her, but there's a lot of the necessary force of personality, sarcasm, physicality, lack of reticence.
Then, for all I know, she may come out as Kick Ass's Hit Girl :)
Also, during the awakenings in which she plays the game, she is nude at first of course, but wraps herself in a cloak. However, she does this for warmth, not modesty. As the SMS style clearly refers often to Klimt, I hardly need attach an example (there are so many anyway), but Klimt's method of combining soft flesh and areas of patterned fabric was very effective.
Re:
The overt palimsest-natured decoration
If spoilt for choice, the Game, I think is a good choice, as it is set "outside time" in a museum filled with representations of everything that appears elsewhere in the narrative. It's a memory palace really, representing Meyr's own mind and thus, anything can plausibly be there (an Eater potted like a fern? Ah, maybe not). Visual clutter can be avoided by just alluding to the various other characters, locations, props in the form of decorative details - easter eggs, if you will.
The manshonyaggers are big - at least as large as a Clydesdale, and maybe about the size of an Indian elephant in terms of bulk, but larger in terms of dimensions on account of their spider-like legs. It would be hard to have one fully in frame with a human without overwhelming them. I can imagine - but again, I don't dictate - that the spread legs of one could form a framing arch in a composition, with it being largely in silhouette if one were included. Still, one can do anything with scale and call it perspective.
I must admit I have no real idea of what the game board looks like except that it might be rather like an orrery.
Pallin, I thought of as looking rather like Ian Richardson or Ian McKellan (not as Gandalf, but an earlier role in a very minimalist production of MacBeth with Judi Dench) or possibly Patrick Stewart or Peter O'Toole. There's certainly a lot of Lord Jagged of Canaria in his makeup. That all suggests a rather stiff, patrician appearance, and that's certainly what I was thinking of, but O'Toole's Henry II in The Lion in Winter shows that an actor who is tall, thin, almost fey in build and basic appearance can play a man who was in reality of average height at best, stocky, athletic and always in motion, rarely sitting. Maybe he's like that Henry, maybe the historical one.
Face can be wherever he likes to be, manifesting, like the Green Man in trees, or in metal. He's almost a Rorschach blot. Giger's portrait of his lover, Li was a starting point... but back to the first sentence, Face is the Last Redoubt's Green Man, and the GM is often used as a decorative motif of course.
One thing about composition is that the cover may be reproduced at about the size of a postage stamp on an Amazon page and it is an additional challenge for artists today to come up with something that has a discernible structure at that scale (even if it is abstract). However, I don't think that will be a problem - why I wanted SMS is, apart from the fact that I like his work a lot and that his style represents the look of the LR so well, is that his art works at large and very small scale on account of its contrasts and composition.
Re:
The sucking, existencially terrifying emptiness of the Night land.
Ha, well. It's dark. Still, my descriptions of the strange weathered rocks and giant bones littering the realm of the Watcher are partly inspired by the dry valleys of Antarctica. Many stones, boulders are "ventifacts", that is, they are sculpted by wind into forms eerily resembling fragmentary skulls. A bit of googling will turn up images.
For example:
http://huey.colorado.edu/77DegreesSouth_Images/ventifact_1_large.jpg
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/211/452042967_10fa70673a.jpg
http://icestories.exploratorium.edu/dispatches/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/ventifact1.jpg
http://lh5.ggpht.com/_bL84HFzJmX8/R_k7hFw3v_I/AAAAAAAAAME/rU-qwXJ65NI/DSCF0500.JPG
Some Max Ernst comes to mind - Europe After the Rain, for example.
Again, my friend who's been on the ice:
http://webcentre.co.nz/melliot/
She does take artistic license - the skies are cloudless usually - and she's enhancing the tropes deliberately, finding fractal congruences between small ridges and tyre tracks and mountain ranges, between pyramidal tents (the only stable form in the winds) and wind-carved mountains and nunataks.
Anyway, I don't want to be an annoying back seat driver. Treat the above as a resource, not a checklist in which every item has to be ticked. I'll be happy if liberties are taken for artistic (or commercial!) effect and look forward to being surprised.
