Saturday 27 January 2018

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.

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