Tag Archives: Melange Books

August 14, 2013 · 5:00 am

Cover Reveal – Penny Pony and Nickel-Bred

I know I usually just show one cover at a time, but in this case, I wanted to talk about creating book covers that are meant to be part of a series. These two covers are for Melange Books’ young adult line. In this case, I worked with the author to find images that worked well for the book (and in the case of Nickel-Bred, the author actually suggested the picture from Dreamstime, and it worked well without needing to be changed). For these covers I had set a specific style of editing and formatting. A block of color above and below the photo, with the title on top and the author’s name at the bottom. Position varied a bit, but I kept the same font in both. Keeping the scheme the same, it should be easily visible that they are of the same series or type of book. Also, being that they are meant to be of a more realistic/contemporary nature, I didn’t do a whole lot of extra editing. I did edit for lighting effects (see the stock images listed below for the changes), and on The Penny Pony I changed spot color and added ear tufts per the author’s request.

So, even thought the colors are different, the style remains relatively similar. Something to think about if you’re designing a cover or having one designed, is how well can you tell the book are of the same “brand” or series.

Stock Images for The Penny Pony:

http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-image-appaloosa-pony-portrait-image20085031
http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-appaloosa-coat-image888990

Stock Images for Nickel-Bred:

http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photos-arabian-horse-portrait-image12661463
http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-images-arabian-horse-image25455479

Photoshop CS6, as usual. 🙂

By the way, if you didn’t know, you can find my work at my Deviant Art account, where I usually upload book covers before I talk about them here. 🙂

http://sbibb.deviantart.com

Leave a comment

Filed under Book Covers, Client Work, Photo Illustration

Tagged as appaloosa, book cover design, book covers, branding, designing for a book series, horse, marketing, Melange Books, Nickel-Bred, novel, Patricia Gilkerson, photographic illustration, pony, SBibb, series, Stephanie Bibb, Stephanie Flint, The Penny Pony, young adult

August 7, 2013 · 4:00 am

Wolfman Owner’s Manual – Book Cover Reveal

Today we have a cover a bit different from the romance covers I’ve been doing. Today we have a cover for the horror genre from Melange Books. 🙂

Let me tell ya, this was fun to do. One, because it involved the anthropomorphic art I enjoy (yay, werewolf!), and two, because it involved a lot of the photographic manipulation I also enjoy doing. Take a look at the original stock images from Dreamstime:

http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-image-timber-wolf-growling-iii-image8983996
http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-image-shirtless-young-athletic-man-growling-outdoors-park-beijing-image31106656
http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-photography-young-woman-screaming-image10656977

In order to create the wolf (which, while working with the author, I realized needed to be more werewolf-like and less anthro wolf), I used a human base to get the pose and body structure. Then, using the wolf image, I cut and pasted sections of fur across the body, paying attention to the direction of the fur. I varied the opacity in areas on the face and chest in order to show just a bit more of the body structure underneath. I also cut and pasted section of the wolf’s face along the man’s face so it fit better. Then the puppet warp tool, the perspective and skew tools, and the smudge tool, became very good friends. They helped to get the wolf-man look I was aiming for. I added in the girl, gave the wolf-man an arm, and played with lighting (opacity layer) to make everything fit together, then finally added the text. The background I did in the early stages.

Of course, one of the factors that gets to come into play with creating an image with a lot of variation due to the puppet warp tool is that the final image doesn’t look quite like the proof image. A section of fur isn’t laid the same, the mouth doesn’t angle quite right. When that happens, I try making the image stronger than it was before, using what I learned in the initial set-up to make the final look more complete. In this case, something wasn’t quite right. The wolf didn’t look as imposing as before. So I made a copy of the image as a whole on a new layer (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E) and used the perspective tool to make the wolf just a bit bigger, a bit closer, and the girl a bit smaller. The change was subtle, but did a lot to help. 🙂

4 Comments

Filed under Book Covers, Client Work, Photo Illustration

Tagged as book cover design, book covers, Dreamstime, fear, horror, Melange Books, novel, photographic illustration, photoshop CS6, SBibb, Stephanie Bibb, Stephanie Flint, terror, Tim Forder, werewolf, werewolves, wolf, Wolfman Owner's Manual

July 31, 2013 · 12:44 pm

JoAnna’s Rescue – Book Cover Reveal

Hello again, long time no-see. But, fear not, I have a book cover to reveal. 🙂

Today we have “JoAnna’s Rescue,” another cover for Melange Books. This one is for a romance novel. This is another case where a collaboration between the author and illustrator can work out well. In this case, the author had an idea of what she wanted, and provided links to a couple images (from Dreamstime) that she thought might fit. However, we wanted a snowy, blizzard look, so I photoshopped in the snow and put the images together. In the long run, the publisher suggested we might also want the guy’s face on the cover (to suggest the romance aspect of the novel), but we didn’t want it to be the main focus. So the author found one she liked (Fotolia), and I added it in, blurring the image a bit an lowering the opacity so that, while it is closer to the viewer, it isn’t the first thing to catch the eye. 🙂

Photoshop CS6.

Stock images from Dreamstime and Fotolia:

http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photography-country-scene-farm-house-winter-image24715572
http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-photo-winter-portrait-young-beauty-image26384705
http://us.fotolia.com/id/27527058

2 Comments

Filed under Book Covers, Client Work, Photo Illustration

Tagged as blizzard, book cover design, book covers, JoAnna's Rescue, LuAnn Nies, Melange Books, novel, photographic illustration, romance, SBibb, Stephanie Bibb, Stephanie Flint

June 19, 2013 · 7:00 am

Cover Reveal – Shadow Trail

This is another cover for Melange Books.

Photoshop CS6. Stock from Dreamstime:

http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-images-woman-red-snowmobile-image17555834
http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photos-forested-shoreline-winter-fog-image7463413
http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-images-young-woman-winter-portrait-image8065139

Sometimes cover design is a process of elimination. Sometimes you hit a design everyone in the cover design process likes the first time around. When I read the cover art form for Shadow Trail, an idea formed, and searching for stock, everything was right there. I placed the elements did some tweaking, then presented it to the author. It worked, yay!

So we put the final cover together with a few more tweaks. As a side note, fonts can help a cover stand out from the rest. A while back I purchased a package of 10,000 fonts, and every once in a while I’ll check to see what I can find there, especially if none of the fonts I currently have are quite working right. (http://www.ultimatefontdownload.com/) Granted, some of the fonts are available for free, if you’re willing to look for them, but here everything is compiled into an easy to search area, for which I use Font Viewer to find what I’m looking for. 🙂

Leave a comment

Filed under Book Covers, Client Work, Photo Illustration

Tagged as book cover art, book cover design, cover illustration, LuAnn Nies, Melange Books, photographic illustration, photomanipulation, publishing, romance short story, SBibb, Shadow Trail, Stephanie Bibb, Stephanie Flint, Ultimate Font Download, using fonts on book covers

June 12, 2013 · 12:06 pm

Cover Reveal – Freeing Abigail

This is another cover for Melange Books.

This is another example of how using a single photo can work for a cover. It’s something I’ve seen more prominent in romance/contemporary works. For this, I used ( http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photography-loving-young-sensual-couple-champagne-bed-image17978822 ) from Dreamstime. This is also a case where the author requested a specific photo. We worked through several potential images before finally deciding on this one, and I changed the hair color of both models to fit the characters, along with fading the image and applying filters and blurring effects to get the final cover image.

Leave a comment

Filed under Book Covers, Client Work, Photo Illustration

Tagged as book cover, book cover design, cover art, Freeing Abigail, LuAnn Nies, Melange Books, photographic illustration, romance novel, SBibb, Stephanie Bibb, Stephanie Flint

May 22, 2013 · 4:00 pm

Cover Reveal – Unfinished Business

This is the cover for Unfinished Business, from Melange Books.

Stock Used:

http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-images-syringe-cup-coffee-image17032004
http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photos-close-up-gold-french-coin-napoleon-wooden-table-image29942453
http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-france-map-image10577480

For this one, the cover turned out to be relatively simple to do. It’s a suspense/thriller. For this, since it is supposed to have a noir feel to it, I used a dark blue primary color, as well as a grunge tinge. Originally there was a thumbtack on Paris (in the stock photo), but at the request of the author, I placed a syringe over Marseilles, where part of the story takes place. I also looked for French coins as part of the cover texture.

The point of doing this is to give readers a sense of what the story is about, and small nuances can make a world of difference in how a cover looks, and whether or not it is picked up by readers. Not only that, but if it’s picked up by the right readers. A cover can get a lot of attention, but if your cover looks like a paranormal romance, and the book is hard-sci, it’s not going to get the correct attention, and may even get negative reviews because the readers didn’t get what they expected.

Something to keep in mind when creating concepts for book covers. 🙂

Leave a comment

Filed under Book Covers, Client Work, Photo Illustration

Tagged as attracting readers, cover creation, cover design, e-publishing, H. Paul Doucette, Melange Books, novel, photographic illustration, photomanipulation, publishing, SBibb, Stephanie Bibb, Stephanie Flint, suspense, Unfinished Business

April 24, 2013 · 7:00 am

Project Northwest – Cover Reveal

This is cover for Melange Books.

Had a bit of fun with this one, since I’d done something similar with the numbers effect before, and it gave me a chance to work with more of a “movie cover” style image. 😀

Photoshop CS6.

Stock Photos from Dreamstime:

http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-photography-man-holding-gun-image24841327
http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-seattle-skyline-sunset-washington-state-image16298240

For my bits of insight on this one, I’d say that this is one that reminded me of playing with style and effects with lighting. I got really lucky with the stock image of the man, which is extremely sharp. However, when I was first creating the image, the draft felt a bit dull and lifeless. For whatever reason, I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t looking like the earlier covers I’d created.

This was the final proof I’d created, before we’d decided to use the stocks. Problem was, it wasn’t popping.

So I went back through my old portfolio and looked to see what was different. The one that really stood out to me was a cover I did for my 1000 Words project: http://sbibb.deviantart.com/art/The-Magician-Cover-297327050?q=gallery%3Asbibb%2F33403924&qo=4

Then it hit me. I went back to the Project Northwest cover, and applied the same type of lighting techniques (using overlay to dodge and burn, as well as the high past filter for sharpness). It made a world of difference. I guess the moral of the story is, sometimes it’s good to look back at what you’ve done in the past to see what did and didn’t work, and lighting can make a scene completely different. 🙂

Leave a comment

Filed under Book Covers, Business Ventures, Photo Illustration, Writing

Tagged as book cover, C.B. Carter, cover design, financial thriller, Melange Books, photographic illustration, Project Northwest, SBibb, Stephanie Bibb, Stephanie Flint, thriller

April 17, 2013 · 9:59 pm

Catrina’s Cowboy – Cover Reveal

Hello, there. Uploading another cover for Melange Books.

This is a bit different from my usual covers, in that only one photo was used (though I did do a bit of manipulation to it), and I used the color overlay and texture to add special effect to it. Photoshop CS6.

Stock Photo from: Dreamstime: http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photography-roundup-image12597472

As a sidenote, since I’m wanting to get back into adding bits of insight I gathered from the project when I post these covers, I thought I’d share a few things.

With this being a single photo, I went about the process a bit differently than usual. The author wanted a picture of a working cowboy, so I ended up selecting a stock photo and choosing a single element to focus on (take a look at the original, linked above, and you’ll notice there were originally more cowboys in the picture). I also did some photoshop to edit the man’s appearance to make him look a bit more like the character she described in the book, then added special lighting and effects. Just because it was a single photo didn’t mean it couldn’t benefit from some editing, especially to give it a more romantic look (the book is a romance).

Not only that, but I also played more with text placement and creating a border overlay. I was reminded of how some covers will have that border around them, and wanted to play with that idea.

Anyways, I hope this has been helpful. 🙂

Leave a comment

Filed under Book Covers, Business Ventures, Client Work, Photo Illustration, Writing

Tagged as book cover, Catrina's Cowboy, cover design, LuAnn Nies, Melange Books, photographic illustration, photoshop, romance, romance novel, SBibb, Stephanie Bibb, Stephanie Flint, stock photography, western

April 11, 2013 · 8:09 pm

Lightpoints – Cover Creation Process

Just thought I’d mention that Peter Kassan, the author of Lightpoints (I did the cover) has recently posted a blog post about the cover creation process. Thought others might be interested. 🙂

Read about the process here: http://peterkassan.com/2013/03/blog/