Tag Archives: creating a book cover

Behind The Scenes – The Devil’s Third Book Cover Remake

Lately, I’ve been working on remaking the book covers for Rebekkah Ford’s Beyond the Eyes trilogy, and I just finished remaking the cover for the final book, The Devil’s Third. (You can see the other two book covers remade: Beyond the Eyes and Dark Spirits).

For the updated version, we settled on using an angel as the character on the cover. The author found a couple images she liked (we cycled through a few before choosing these two), and got the advice of her fans before settling on the current model. Then I found an older image I’d taken of a bird with outstretched wings, did some inversions to the colors (this was actually the inner portion of the wings, rather than the outside shot), and put together the composite image. Of course, we also tried to stick with the same placement and feel of the other two covers.

Needless to say, I think I’ve improved a lot since I first started making book covers. Now, here’s the remake of Rebekkah Ford’s The Devil’s Third, a paranormal romance.

Before:

SBibb - The Devil's Third - Book Cover

SBibb - The Devil's Third - Wrap-Around Book Cover

After:

SBibb - The Devil's Third - Book Cover Remake

SBibb - The Devil's Third - Wrap-around Book Cover Remake

Stock images from Shutterstock:

http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=95544481 – man

http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=309884051 – graveyard

All other images are my own.

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Behind the Scenes – The French Couple

A cover for Melange Books. For this one, they already had the main art they wanted on the cover, but they wanted the title redone and a few adjustments made in regards to the overall effects. For this one, I mostly played with adding color to the dark halo around the model’s head, and played with the placement and color of the text so that it felt like part of the cover. This is the result:

SBibb - The French Couple - Book Cover

The publisher provided the image to be used on the cover.

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Behind the Scenes – Murder In Her Dreams

This is a cover for Melange Books.

For this cover, we wanted a dream-like feel to accompany the idea of the story, in which the main character is having symbolic dreams involving a black rabbit attacking a man. While we stuck with the initial positioning and texturing I created, my first proof used a contrasty red and yellow theme. For the final, we decided to tone it down to purple and blue and black to give it a more dream-like feel.

This is is the end result:

SBibb - Murder In Her Dreams - Book Cover

Stock photos from Dreamstime:
http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-images-man-green-jumper-34-image2456679
http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-image-jumping-jack-rabbit-image13466896
http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-image-torn-metal-texture-over-rusty-grunge-backdrop-image15468411
http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-image-grunge-blue-painted-wall-texture-background-image14562711
http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-image-wall-texture-may-use-as-grunge-background-image24050441
http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-image-abstraction-image1251511

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Behind the Scenes – Mira’s View

This is a cover for Melange Books.

For this cover, since the background was horizontal and worked well to wrap-around, I went ahead and created a wraparound background, rather than my usual basic background. This ended up using two different images for the elf… the face and head were one photo, to match the description of the character, and the body/outfit were another, to match the style of outfit requested on the art form. On the final image, since the hair was cut off at the edges on the original photo, I played with the smudging effects to create a more illustrated, fantastical look, and I also played with the softness of the background using Gaussian blur, Lens Blur, and overlay/soft light effects.

Here’s the end result. 🙂

Basic wrap-around, no spine or text on back cover:

SBibb - Mira's View - Wrap-around Book Cover

 

Front E-Book Cover:

SBibb - Mira's View - Book Cover

Stock images from Dreamstime:

http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-photography-portrait-young-beautiful-woman-long-flowin-image24027857
http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-images-elf-image37703849
http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-images-green-forest-mountain-view-top-some-villas-image32433154

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Behind the Scenes – Fateful Encounters

This is a cover for Melange Books.

The fun thing with putting this cover together was trying to convey the sinister/mysterious mood and keep with the thriller category. In this case, I went with showing the city at the bottom and hinting at one of the characters on the cover… without actually showing her full face. Add in the gritty city textures, and you have a cover. Something to keep in mind during cover creation is what you do with the text. Using clipping masks, you can add texture directly to the text and help incorporate it into the overall image.

SBibb - Fateful Encounters - Book Cover

Stock photos from: Dreamstime.

http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-photos-melbourne-night-image15166508
http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-images-client-prostitute-image24545929
http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-image-girl-near-brick-wall-image14524801
http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-images-grunge-background-image19731104

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Filed under Book Covers, Client Work, Photo Illustration