This is a book cover I did for an upcoming book, The Lone Werewolf, from Melange Books. The stock images used are from Dreamstime: (http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photography-angry-wolf-image18076302 and http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photos-heritage-days-image2981113). All other images are my own. 🙂
I used Photoshop CS6 and Lightroom 4.0.
Filed under Book Covers, Business Ventures, Client Work, Photo Illustration
This is a book cover I did for Melange Books. I did use one stock image, the face. The rest of the pictures are my own. This is the first fantasy/romance/erotica based cover I’ve done.
At the moment it isn’t yet released, but you can find it at Melange Book’s main website when it is: http://www.melange-books.com
Filed under Book Covers, Business Ventures
Today I get to reveal the cover for Building A Better Monster, by Christopher Treagus. 😀 The book is anthology of stories, published by Barking Rain Press.
You can find the book here:
http://www.barkingrainpress.org/products/building-a-better-monster/
To put the cover together, I used multiple photographs I’d taken earlier of various animals, then put them together based on the different descriptions I’d found of a chupacabra. The publisher wanted a gridwork frame behind it, based around the concept of “building” the monster, and I want to thank my husband Isaac for giving me an idea of how to do it. Anyways, this is the cover that I completed. 🙂
Filed under Book Covers, Photo Illustration
Another Distant Horizon based picture. It’s been a while since I’ve done any sort of coloring of sketched art. So, to explain this, I started out by sketching the image with a pencil, then went and did a basic lining of that with a pen. Afterwards, I did some shading work with the pen, then erased the extraneous pencil marks. Once that was done, I photographed the image flat with a flash on my camera and pulled it into photoshop. Did the threshold adjustment to convert it to black and white.
Then I started layering and using clipping modes combined with blending modes and masking to apply textures and coloration. The textures were mostly pulled from pictures I took on a walk downtown earlier in the day. Once that was complete, added the sections around the tank, and blurred the edge a little to give it that dreamlike quality.
Overall I’m pretty happy with this. Granted, it’s not the best, by any means, but since I was experimenting with the technique, I’m not going to complain. And I’m thrilled with how the hand came out. I think it actually looks semi-realistic and pressed to the glass. Yay!
So… now that you know how it’s made, a quick explanation of the picture itself. It’s a scene… rather a couple scenes, in which the main character of my novel I’m working on is caught in a telepathic attack. And she’s imagining she’s in a beastie tank… which turns people into monsters. Long story short. But that memory attack plays back into the story more than once, so I wanted to have a shot at creating an image of the tank.
Anyways, that’s all for now. Done on my laptop with Photoshop CS4 and bridge. And a mouse.
Filed under Personal Work, Photo Illustration, Writing
This was a gift to my husband. He’d surprised me by dressing up all fancy-like and grabbing his sword (nice way to introduce the idea of an impromptu date), and I got a few pictures. A few days later I put this together, using some pictures I’d shot earlier of a hawk he spotted and some woodsy pictures. All the images are mine and this was completed in Photoshop CS6 and Lightroom 4.0. 🙂
Filed under Personal Work, Photo Illustration
Originally titled “Stuck at Twilight,” Four-Way Stop was supposed to be about a guy who comes to a stoplight, then realizes all four lights are red. He waits around, then finally decides to run the lights… only to find himself stuck in the crossway of another dimension.
Instead, Four-Way Stop turned into some literary/horror mix, about a man whose choices lead him directly to a four-way stop. Maybe later I’ll write the original idea as a short story, or maybe not. Now that I’ve completed the short stories for 1000 Words (and I have the print book formatted, too!), I’m going to be quite happy to return my focus to my young adult novel I’m working on, Distant Horizon (you’ll probably hear more about that in future posts, when I run out of things to say about 1000 Words).
The cover for Four-Way Stop was probably one of the easiest for me to complete, even though it was one of the fastest I had to finish. I knew from the start that I wanted to have a red stoplight play a prominent feature in the image. Better yet, it needed to be gray, and preferably have rows of corn or wheat, as well as a road running through it.
So I searched through my personal stock imagery, and found an amalgamation of images to put together. A road, tall grass, a red stop-light (knew I had to have that picture somewhere…) and a weird tire-texture that I motioned blurred for the rain. Put it together, and by itself, it looked horrible. This is where textures came in handy. Since it was supposed to be rainy, I added a bit of cloud texture to give it a foggy look. Blurred the background, since who can see in heavy rain? Added the rain texture and tinkered with the effect. Finally chose the image of the girl, and blurred out the side of the face as part of the story. Made it look ghostly, changed the color to a stormy green.
Gotta admit, I was pretty happy with the result.
Anyways, I then worked on adding the text. I wanted to play with text placement, and conveying the idea of a stoplight. I also wanted “Stop” to be in red, and play a prominent feature. Thus I placed the texture into the corner, all nice and small. It did show the background, but it didn’t really look like a title. So I made it larger, and while I’m not happy that it obscured the background as much as it did, I am happy about the placement, now.
Below is the background image, as well as the final book cover.
You can find Four-Way Stop, a literary/horror short story, for free on Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/153784
In the meantime, if you’re curious about the statistics for the project as a whole, Dreamkeeper is in the lead with 122 downloads, easily surpassing The Carrier, which has been up a week longer, and stands at 102 downloads. It’s possible that people are downloading in multiple versions, or not reading them, but still, I found it interesting to see. I’ve gotten a couple more reviews on the stories (mostly good, yay!), but Dreamkeeper has none at this point in time.
Aside from the short I just did upload, Shafted Dreams has a measly 19 downloads, and no reviews. I do wonder whether this is because of the cover or the blurb, since everything else is between 30-70 downloads.
After this, I only have one more 1000 Words short story to upload, Socks, and I’ll have a little bit to talk about its cover, as well. The final short story, dubbed “1000 Words” for the title of the anthology, will only be available in the eBook and print anthology versions. I’m not quite sure what I’ll sell the print version at, but the eBook version will likely cost $2.99. I don’t expect a lot of sells, especially since I don’t have any marketing plans in place for it, however, I think it’s nice to offer something for those who want to “contribute to the author.”
Meanwhile, the print version of 1000 Words is in the proofing stage (to be printed as soon as possible, in order to get in turned in on time), but I’m fairly happy with it. Reminds me that I actually enjoy formatting print books. Of course, the next step is the eBook, which means seeing how to implement special text as well as embedding images into the file.
Let me know if you have questions, I’d be happy to answer them. 🙂
Filed under Book Covers, Writing
This was a photoshoot I did with Christina. The idea was to have a fantasy warrior/mage character, and we went over to Culp Park when the weather turned unexpectedly nice. I was looking to get “video game action poses,” and it turned out to be really fun. I came back with over a thousand pictures to sort through. Got it down to 100 images, then finally twenty favorites. These are the resulting images. 🙂
Flickr Slideshow: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sbibb/sets/72157629206245630/show/
Filed under Photo Illustration
Filed under Photo Illustration
A SciFi based photoshoot. My main goal was to get pictures that resembled the main character in my young adult novel I’m writing, Distant Horizon. Stacia modeled for me, and luckily we were able to get the vine armband to work. There’s also a sneak peak at one of the Honors College project book covers I’m working on on Flickr. 🙂
Flickr Slideshow: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sbibb/sets/72157629059771900/show/
Filed under Portrait
One of my interests with photography is to create book covers, so my initial thought is to cater to those who are self-publishing or e-publishing. I commonly frequent the writer’s forum Absolute Write (since I’m writing young adult novels myself), and I offered to do a free book cover for someone as practice, and to get a better idea of the process. Today I completed the book cover for Rebekkah, for her upcoming book, Beyond the Eyes. I still need to format it for various uses through e-publishing and promotions, but this is the resulting image. 🙂
You can find her blog here: http://themusingwriter.blogspot.com/
Filed under Book Covers
Stephanie Flint - Author and Artist 