Latest Cover Design: C.M. Simpson: Short Works from 2017, Volume 1 (Fantasy & Urban Fantasy)

The second cover completion for the month is for a collection to be released on January 27, 2019. This one's a collection of all the fantasy and urban fantasy short story released by C.M. Simpson Publishing in 2017.

The cover concept is based on the tradition of earlier covers in this line, where I draw elements of the design from the cover designs for any of the short stories published that year and contained in the collection. It was fairly difficult to decide which ones would work best, but here's the process.

The first step was, of course, to put down a black base, and add in the title and author by-line. After that I added in the first element - the dragon from the short story, The Seeker from Hivrala, because what's a fantasy cover without a dragon, right?

Because of the way the dragon is positioned, it was easy to decide to place the other elements in a diagonal line to draw the eye across the cover. For these, I chose the lizardman from the fantasy short, Luck Among Servants, and the unicorn from the urban fantasy short, A Matter of Justice.

The dragon is a modified form of original artwork by Valentyna Chukhlyebova, and was isolated and colour-altered during the cover process for The Seeker from Hivrala. The lizardman is original artwork by Junichi Shimazaki, and was isolated during the cover creation process for Luck Among Servants. The unicorn is from original artwork by Corey A. Ford, and was isolated during the cover creation process for A Matter of Justice.  All images were sourced from Dreamstime.com, and all modifications were done using GIMP.

The final thing that needed to be added was a background. For this I decided to take the ocean combination from A White Pinnacle. That background was originally created using photography by Ig0rzh (the lightning over the ocean), and Pumidol Lelerdsakulvong (the rock pinnacle). Those images were manipulated using GIMP, and sourced from Dreamstime.com.

When I was done, I thought something was missing, and decided to add the pixie from Memory's Return and Road Trip to the top right of the cover in order to balance out the dragon. I chose not to add another image to the bottom left, but did move the lizardman a fraction more to the right to add more weight to that side of the cover. The pixie is another piece of art by Junichi Shimazaki at Dreamstime.

The background was still a little bit light for the white lettering, so I used GIMP's brightness and contrast feature to darken all elements, and sharpen their edges. It's interesting to note that contrast defines images more, but also makes them a little darker, as well.

When all elements had been modified with increased contrast and decreased brightness, I noticed that the pixie was still too light, so I selected her layer in the 'Layers' tool bar, and the selected the brightness/contrast option and repeated the process. Once that was done, the letters were more visible even though she was behind them, giving me the final cover image.

Latest Cover Design: Memory's Vampire

Here’s the first cover completion for the month. This one is for a short horror story by C.M. Simpson. It’s called Memory’s Vampire.

Photographs were sourced from dreamstime.com as follows: Frederico Marsicano for the vampire (taken from his image "Two elegant handsome vampires looking camera"); Oleg Zabielin for the soldiers and the flame (taken from the photograph "Black silhouettes of soldiers"); and Ivan Vander Biesen for the graveyard (which this cover does not show to its full glory, but which can be seen in the photograph "Langemark WWI Cemetery, Flanders Fields, Ypres, Belgium"). The cover image was created using GIMP, and any manipulation misjudgements are mine.

This cover was a little difficult to complete. I wanted fire and vampires and a female character for the front, so my first idea was to have a slightly angled rear view of a woman with a flame thrower. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find one. I also looked for a woman with a grenade launcher, and a woman in body armour, but there were no satisfactory images. Point to note – why do almost all the pictures of women with military hardware look like they’re using the hardware as a prop in a photo shoot for a sexy magazine. I mean, sheesh!

I wanted a picture of a woman handling a weapon like she knew how – because that’s what the female characters in the story’s I design covers for do. They’re tough, smart, and they dress for combat, not like combat kitten sex symbols at some photo shoot. The gals I need images for are proficient, efficient, and know their soldiering, but finding pictures depicting capable combat-ready women is almost impossible, regardless of whether it’s for science fiction, fantasy or contemporary settings. I spend a lot of time looking for (and often not finding) those images.

Anyway, with a lack of side-angled rear-views of a woman operating a fire-spouting flame thrower (or any other suitable substitutes), I had to take a different approach. In addition to not finding a woman with a flame thrower, I couldn’t find a decent gout of flame-thrower flame, which meant I had to find my fire in another form, hence the picture of soldiers against a backdrop of fire - a choice I do not regret.

The next difficulty I had was in finding the kind of garden I had in my head. I wanted a palace courtyard garden, preferably with a fountain, or weeping willows or a view from under a weeping willow or from beneath a large tree looking across a formal garden. No real luck, although I had the privilege of browsing some very nice shots. In the end I decided on a most excellent grave-yard.

The final problem was the vampire. I was hoping for the classic vampire with a woman carried in his arms across his chest – and I came across an unexpected problem: most of the vampires were snarling, or in arms askew positions, or in the about-to-pounce pose. I wanted one that was dignified, sinister, and not a comical caricature - also one that did not have blood dribbling down his chin, and did not look like a madman.

There were a few that fitted this description. There were also a few that looked like zombie-vampire crosses. Anyway, I finally found the vampire in the picture, and just had to isolate him, and layer him in. Okay, and maybe rotate him a little, but he suited the image, and the story, quite well.

Steps to the design?

Well, I started with the short story template, and altered the descriptive text and the title to suit, then I added the background, deciding what portions I was going to keep in the frame, and making sure the title, by-line and short description were over the base layer. After that I darkened it a very little, and gave the contrast a slight tweak.

After that I had to decide whether or not it was going to be the soldier silhouette or the graveyard that was placed on top and made slightly transparent. The picture on the left, has the graveyard layered over the top of the soldiers with an opacity of 63.9 per cent. The picture on the right has the soldiers layered over the graveyard with an opacity of 45.5 per cent. I chose the picture on the right to serve as the base for the next stage, just because the definition was a tiny bit sharper on the soldiers.

The final stage was to slide the vampire face in between the top and bottom layers, rotate it because to have it the size I needed meant it ended before the bottom of the cover, and that ending had to be off-page—and I had to isolate the image from the background and the other vampire in the picture. This isolation required selecting the section of the picture containing the vampire I wanted, reducing it so that the longest side was 525 px in length, outlining the vampire and then cutting him away from the background, before pasting him back into the image, blanking out the background and resizing the image to the original height. After that, it was a simple matter of opening the isolated vampire as a layer in the cover image being created. It took me a couple of goes to get the angle of the face where I wanted it, with the entire cover creation process having to be repeated between attempts as I played with positioning. In the end, I chose the second-last trial run (the picture on the left, below).

 
All in all, this was a relatively simple cover to put together, once the images were found, but I spent quite a few hours trying to find the images I wanted, as well as reworking the cover concept when I initially couldn't find what was in my head... and now I have some more photographers I can go to when this kind of image is needed.