Feedback and general impression.
Dying Under Painted Skies is a post-apocalyptic story told through a series of raw, found-footage-style journal entries written by the 27 year old protagonist Moxie Callahan. After the world collapses and dangerous bioweapons known as VEX entities take over, Moxie travels across the ruined American Southwest in her truck. Alongside a mutated, white jackal named Ghost, she documents the brutal reality of surviving in a sun-bleached, post-apocalyptic desert.
The front cover captures the poetic, melancholic soul of Moxie's journey and her final moments. Even as she lies dying from blood loss in her final entry, she looks out and notes, "The sun's coming up. It's stupidly beautiful today-pinks and golds over the wreckage. Figures the world decides to look nice right before I leave it." The soft gradient and giant, warm sun on the front cover directly mirror this scene.
But things take a devastating turn in the final entries when the bioweapon jackals corner her inside a ruined structure. Bleeding out and slipping into a state of delirium, Moxie looks up through a shattered ceiling and notes that the night sky "looks red. Always red.”. The heavy, suffocating wine-red gradient and the harsh, off-center crimson moon on the back cover perfectly trap that sense of doom. The back cover embodies the terror, isolation, and delirium of her final night.
Together, the two covers create a powerful visual timeline that spans from the hopeful beginning of Moxie’s final days to the tragic reality of her end. By shifting from the soft, pink sunset of the front cover to the suffocating, bleeding dark of the back, the artwork perfectly encapsulates the entire trajectory of a solitary journey that ultimately fades into the silence of the desert night.