Behind the Scenes – Screw the Devil’s Daiquiri

This is a cover for Melange Books.

In this case, the author wanted an illustrated cover to fit with the style of story he’d written. While I primarily deal with photomanipulation, I decided to give it a try. My first couple attempts ended up looking too cartoonish (which the story is not), so I finally decided to go with a heavily altered photomanipulation using Photoshop CS6. That is… the table is illustrated, the devil tail is illustrated, and the daiquiri was created by using a combination of several Photoshop Filters (Cutout and Notebook at varying levels of opacity and filter options). As for the face and fingers, they’re a mix of illustration and photomanipulation. Though their base is in a photo, I painted in and masked out sections to create the overall look the author wanted. The eyes went through a number of revisions, mostly using the liquefy tool, then painting the pupils and light reflections back in. The hair horns were actually unintentional at first, but the author like the look, so we tweaked them to make them more specific to the image. I also toyed with letter placement of the text to add to the mood of the cover.

Anyway, this is the result: