cover design process | Stephanie Flint

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April 4, 2026 · 7:16 am

Designing the Cover for The Cursed Halls of Kalecen

I recently shared my process for designing the cover of The Restless Sands of Neel, and today I thought I might take a look into the steps I took for the next book in the series, The Cursed Halls of Kalecen.

This ended up being the final cover:

The Cursed Halls of Kalecen - Book Cover

I had a lot of fun with this story, since it deals with an immortal creature known in Cirena as a chesnathé.

Long story short, they’re this world’s version of a unicorn… except they’re a mix of the European unicorn and the Asian qilin, so chesnathéme are known for either judging their victims as guilty and killing them by spearing the guilty party’s heart with their horn, or determining they’re innocent and, (if “pure of heart”), granting them immortality.

Thing is, one of the Cirenan gods, Kalecen, has a broken horn and his sense of justice is… skewed. Technically a god of justice, he’s more a god of revenge.

So when the student of a protective duelist, Hahven,foils a revenge plot and incurs the wrath of Kalecen, it’s up to Hahven to shield her from the god’s harsh judgement.

For the cover, I wanted to depict Hahven facing off with Kalecen, but the first few images I rendered seemed far too static, so I ultimately ended up adding the god’s blood-thirsty champion to the picture… and I liked the result a lot better.

Here’s a few of the in-progress pictures:

I used Daz Studio to model the images, and it took several tries before I was finally happy with how it looked. (And a few days of running renders at night to give it enough time to render at a large size without being grainy). The images above are the raw renders, before I took them into Photoshop.

A: The first version. I used atmospheric lighting, which I liked, but it was too dark and Hahven’s pose seemed too static. Not exciting enough.

B. Different lighting method (no atmosphere), and I tweaked the pose so that he would be facing Kalecen better, but it was still missing something. Too static.

C. Added in Kalecen’s champion. Now he’s facing off with her… and he is supposed to be level headed, but… (can you guess what I’m going to say here?) Still too static.

(Noticing the trend?)

D. Brightened the scene a bit more and changed Hahven’s pose. Much more dynamic… but forgot to use DForce on the clothes to get them to lay naturally. Not a fan of the lighting. Also, accidentally angled the camera wrong and ended up with the purple blotch where the floor ended.

E. DForced Hahven’s clothes and now they lay properly. Also added the atmospheric lighting back (but with higher brightness levels). After changing the angle, I was much happier with the result. He’s benefitting from one of the roof’s lights, and it’s also much more dynamic. Plus… shiny reflection, even if you don’t get to see much of it on the actual cover do to the typography.

Ultimately I decided to zoom in so he’d be closer on the cover, but version E was the one I ended up Photoshopping. 🙂

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Read The Cursed Halls of Kalecen and root for a duelist fighting an unhinged god of justice…

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Happy reading and writing! 📚

Designing the cover for The Restless Sands of Neel

Like many of my cover designs, especially my designs using Daz renders, the design for The Restless Sands of Neel had a major shift from the first iteration to the final.

Sometimes the title changes, too! Originally I was going to call the novella, The Dragon in the Desert.

But, after feedback from newsletter subscribers, I was worried it might disappoint readers looking for a more typical dragon.

Ro’nor, the protagonist, might have descended from dragons, but he doesn’t have wings or any of their special powers, and he can’t shift into their form. The biggest creature we see in the story is a monstrous pit worm.

So… after a bunch of brainstorming, deliberating, and tweaking words to see what else might work, I finally settled on:

The Restless Sands of Neel

Anyhow, here’s a look at the first proof I made for the cover:

There were some changes I already planned to make: a different set of robes/shirt, maybe a different hair once I double-checked what was stated in the story, possibly a different coat pattern for the horse to make sure it’s consistent with the story, and the final touch-ups to make it look like a polished cover.

I sent this out, along with the tentative title, to the newsletter, and several readers chimed in with their thoughts and suggestions. (Much appreciated!)

As a result, I ended up making some major changes, two based on making it more accurate to the novella (the horse’s coat color and the main character’s hair style), and I did a bit of work to make it more dynamic and personal (a common problem of mine, for some reason).

And so I ended up with this for the final version of the cover: