New Cover: Dear Tiger: I Don’t Think I’m Human Any More

The fourth, and final, cover completed last week was for Dear Tiger: I Don’t Think I’m Human Anymore, the second book in Carlie Simonsen’s The Tiger Letters series.

As mentioned before, I followed the common planets’ theme, using artwork by Roberto Pirola, and the emphasised a story element using photography by Stefano90, both sourced from Dreamstime.

The process was similar to those before, and I used GIMP to isolate elements in the chemistry photograph, and bring them closer together, and also to alter the opacity of the planetary art work.

The final cover is as follows:

Trapped in a room, and unable to hug her family, Simone knows she is changing. She just doesn’t know what she’s changing into, or how long it will take. The company doctors won’t tell her, and Tiger seems so far away. But at least he writes back, and he’s trying to help. Maybe, together, they can find a way out.

New Cover: Granny Finds a Gas Mask

The third cover completed this week was designed for the first chapter book in the Granny Finds Adventure series, by Carlie Simonsen. In this case, the item Granny found was a gas mask. This was a little tricky to do, but I opted for simple, using a common background, or background idea, with a single item to differentiate it.

The item for this book was the gas mask, for which I found a close approximation in a photo of a gas mask by Exopixel on Dreamstime. The background is from one of my own pictures of some Australian parkland, suitably cropped and darkened. Both gas mask and park land were manipulated by GIMP, and the cover was created by the same program.

Again, I started with a template base, and then layered in the elements I wanted. The process looked a little like this.

The final product looks like this.

Helping Gran is a chore, but with her holding their mobile phones hostage, Gareth and Giselle have no choice. Unpacking boxes of books is no surprise. Unpacking the gas mask is—and so is finding themselves back in the war, in Gran’s war, because ‘some things are meant to be changed’. How on Earth, does Gran expect them to help with this? Better yet, how on Earth, can they get back home?

Granny Finds a Gas Mask is the first book in a series where the things Granny finds lead to adventure, and Gareth and Giselle have to figure out how to get back to their own time and place.

Latest Cover: Dear Tiger: I Miss You

The second cover completed this week was a reworking of an earlier cover for Carlie Simonsen’s Dear Tiger. The title has been updated, and the series is now planned to be five books long, so a set of covers needed to be created to pull the series together.

Carlie’s chapter books use Segoe Print Bold for the Title, and Tiger Rag LeT for her byline. I use a black base, and then build up from there.

Apart from the title and by-line branding, I had to figure out a slightly different look for each line, so, starting this year, I will be working with the older covers to update each series. In The Tiger Letters series, I’ve decided to use a series of planets as the background, and then add a second picture to emphasise some of the other content in the story.

I’ve also added in the series name and the book’s place in that series, and retained Dear Tiger as part of the title. This sometimes makes it hard for the entire title to fit, but we’re working on that. The pictures below show the original cover, followed by the place-holder cover, and the cover final. There’s not a log of difference, but it’s there.

Planetary artwork was by Roberto Pirola and sourced from Dreamstime, while the photograph of the notepad, pen and envelope was by Feng Yu, and also sourced from Dreamstime. I have manipulated both pieces of work and combined them to form the cover using GIMP.

“Dear Tiger, this has been the best day ever… but I lie.”

Simone Michaels is in trouble, but she doesn’t know how deep. Her parents’ expedition has gone missing, and that she’s afraid she’ll go missing, too. Will she get the chance to see her mum and dad, again?

Latest Cover: Reluctant Liaison

In addition to getting a little sketching done, and starting back with taking photographs, I found I needed to get the next round of covers ready for C.M. Simpson Publishing. This is the first of the four covers I finalised to round out the week.

I’ve started templating the branding on the covers for each author’s line of writing. For the short stories, this included adding a line to make it clear on the cover that the story was a short story, and not a novel. I use GIMP to create the covers and do any manipulation of the photographs and art work, so I use Baskerville Old Face for the C.M. Simpson byline, and Berlin Sans FB for the Title and story note.

Because the completion of the story is often blogged before the cover is created, I now create a place holder cover for each story, and then fill in the elements just prior to the editing and formatting stage. This cover went through three stages: the template, the background, and the final stage, after additional artwork and photography had been sourced from Dreamstime.

In this case, the background is a clip from one of my photographs, and I’ve turned to Junichi Shimazaki for the female pixie and Yekophotostudio for my Paranormal Operations Squad officer. My only disappointment was in not being able to find any good, tough-looking male pixies, or pixies sitting on a branch, but you can’t have it all, and I love Junichi’s pixie gals.

 

I woke up in a car—upside down, staring into the faces of a half dozen pixies sitting on a tree branch. To one side, was a cliff face, to the other, sky, and things were starting to shift. Apparently, I’d had an interesting night… if only I could remember what it was, and why I’d run, and why following the pixies scared me almost as much as the idea of staying in the car…

In Reluctant Liaison the Paranormal Operations Squad is faced with a dilemma outside their usual remit, when Otherworld and ‘real’ world cultures clash.