Roadside Picnic is a cult classic Soviet science fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
It is relatively obscure, but has been the inspiration for a number of more famous media properties: the movie Stalker (1979) directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video game series by Ukrainian developer GCS Game World, and the movie Annihilation (2018) directed by Alex Garland.
The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games set their version of the the story in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. This is an interesting interpretation of the urban wasteland depicted in Picnic, and I have used it as the basis for this cover design.
I discovered images of the Zone created by thrill seekers who explore it in a manner very similar to how the main character of Picnic explores the alien-infected landscape. I stitched together several of those images to create a tableau from the novel.
After I put all the images into composite, I painted in shadows, matched the colors and exposure, and added a cloudy sky. I added a vignette to make the image gloomier and fit better with the text for the cover.
Finally I added a layer of overexposed spatter, mimicking the spots of overexposure created on film on by exposure to radiation.
