Patricia Gilkerson | Stephanie Flint

Tag Archives: Patricia Gilkerson

May 27, 2016 · 10:00 am

Behind the Scenes – The Quarter Horse

A cover for Melange Books’s YA imprint, Fire and Ice. This is the fourth book in The Horse Rescuers series, and so we wanted to keep the style the same as the other books. In this case, we kept the same layout and font. We tried a couple different colors as the main color scheme (each book is a bit different), and ultimately settled on the gray-blue.

For the horse image, I used the art form to reference the kind of horse the author wanted, and then I created a lightbox on Dreamstime with several horse options (and I checked to see what general season I should be looking for). The author selected two of those images, which I made rough proofs. Once we narrowed it down, I finalized the cover.

This is the end result:

Rough version of the back cover (subject to change per the Publisher’s needs):

The Quarter Horse - Back Cover Blog

Stock photo from Dreamstime.

http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-images-bay-horse-image3555999 – horse

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.