Separate Lives | Stephanie Flint

This is a cover for Melange Books. For this cover, the author requested that we create a template for the cover which could be used for future books in the series. After some tweaking, I settled on a frame to border the main image of the cover, along with placing the silhouette of the gavel and the text. It should be fairly easy to duplicate (especially since I keep notes on each layer about any blur effects and such), though we’ll need to purchase another licence for the gavel from Dreamstime for each cover.

Whenever I make proofs, I leave notes for myself in the layers, that way I can easily replicate any special effects I did for the proof on the final. For example, if I used a lens blur on a layer, I’ll make a note that looks something like “51-41-119 Lens Blur” for the name of the layer. Anything that I commonly change, I’ll make a note of. Sometimes the notes get long, and I’ll copy them into Word so I can read them, but the result is that it’s much easier to complete a final image, especially if there’s a month or so between creating a proof and receiving stock images (which happens when creating proofs in advance of a stock subscription purchase).

Anyway, this is the final cover for Separate Lives, by Rhonda Strehlow:

Also, an example of how the basic back cover might look (I set it so that color blur is optional, and they may change the signature to one of their imprints):

SBibb - Separate Lives - Book Cover Back