This is what I want to do. Only better.

Ok, Perfume. Have you read it?

If not, here's my short synopsis. Guy is born with the most extraordinary sense of smell, but curiously has no body odour of his own. He generally finds the smell of humans repulsive and overpowering, with the exception of the occasional person - always young virgins, who contrarily have the most sublime smell imaginable to him. He gets an internship with a perfumer, learns how to make perfumes, then kills the girls to make a perfume out of their scent. The ending of the book is weird and *spoiler* involves a mass orgy and cannibalism.

Now, all the existing covers for the book are pretty cliched - dark, moody, lots of flesh tones, redc colours, and beautiful ginger girls (all the girls he kills have auburn hair)

I really really want to escape from this, and produce something that is hopefully striking and intriguing, but not blindingly obvious in terms of inspiration.

Amongst other ideas, I'm interested in the concept that every individual person has this strong smell which emanates from them in waves, and I want to represent this visually.

At the moment I'm really inspired by things like this, this, this, this and this

Possibly the wrong area to get inspiration from, because they're mainly books full of cold hard facts, wheras this is a novel... but oh well, I'm going with it anyway.

BUT, these are just ideas. I really need to go back to this location with a group of people who are dressed slightly less conspiciously 21st century (i.e. black, long skirts on the girls, no trainers etc), arrange them in a nicer fashion, and get some better shots to work with. I also need to work on what kind of circles I'm going to use, what kind of typeface... basically everything.

I do like the blue and grey though.

Here are some ideas so far.