Latest Cover Design—Mack ‘n’ Me: Blaedergil’s Host

Following up from February, I’ve created the second cover in the Mack ‘n’ Me ‘n’ Odyssey series. The second novel, Mack ‘n’ Me: Blaedergil’s Host takes place a little ways down the track and has a bit of political intrigue, but essentially continues the story of Cutter and Mack as they work out their working relationship. 

The first step was the usual use of a template designed for the series.

The second step was a lot easier because of my previous forays onto Dreamstime. I chose a planetary background by Forplayday that had a myriad of stars, because it seemed reminiscent of the word ‘host’ in the novel’s title. It needed to be resized, and then the layer had to be shifted so that it lay under the words for the title and byline.

After that, I used the second in a series of characterimages by Yekophotostudio that I’d found on Dreamstime. I tried out how it looked both under the planet layer, and above it, and decided to over lay it. After that, I isolated the guy and girl elements from the original background, and positioned them at the base of the cover in the foreground.

That was the easy part.

The next step was to get them to blend together to form a more cohesive image. At this point, I decided the flesh tones and natural colouring weren’t quite what I was looking for, although they looked okay.  All manipulation was done in GIMP.

The first thing I did was darken the character image to -29, using the ‘Color Saturation’ tool under the Colors drop-down menu. I then decreased the Hue Saturation to -49 in the ‘Hue Saturation’ tool under the ‘Colors’ drop-down menu, and then highlighted the planetary layer, and

then I played with the ‘Brightness-Contrast’ tool (also found under the ‘Colors’ drop-down tab, and adjusted the entire image, bringing the brightness up to +2, and increasing the contrast to +58.

I still wasn’t happy with the effect, so I used the ‘Color Balance’ tool to adjust the background, increasing the hue saturation by +38, reducing the lightness by -33 and increasing the saturation by +15. After that, I decided I wanted more yellow in the background, so I used the ‘Color Balance’ tool to reduce the yellow-blue balance by -49.

 

 

After that, I wasn’t sure if I was happy with the background, or not, so I returned to the step I’d saved as Dev10—and this taught me the important of saving the image at each step, because it’s much easier to go back to a saved step and rework it, than to try to undo everything to get the image looking like it did, at that step. It’s also useful to put the abbreviated changes into the saved .jpg file title, so you remember what you did, when you go back to it.

After returning to Dev10, I used the Color Balance tool to increase the yellow-blue balance by +60, and then reduced the cyan-red to -18, and finally tweaked the yellow-blue colour balance line another -49 on the planetary layer. The last step was to use the Brightness-Contrast tool to reduce the brightness by -49, so that the words became more visible.

This was the image, I finally decided on.

Of course, I then discovered I’d missed something while isolating the character image. The errored image is on the left, the corrected image on the right. I count it as a lesson in vigilance.

 

Latest Cover Design: Dear Tiger: Don’t Look Back

Last week, I worked on four covers: 2 for chapter books, 1 for a short story, and 1 for a novel. I’ll go through the basic process here, but if you’d like more details on any particular process, just say so in the comments below, and I’ll do a step-by-step screen-shotted outline.

In the meantime, here is the construction of the cover for Carlie Simonsen’s Dear Tiger: Don’t Look Back.

I started with the basic cover. Set up for this was to give it a width of 1850 px, a height of 2850 px, and a resolution of 600 px/in. After that, I used the fill tool in the toolbox (the little tipping bucket), made sure the colour square at the bottom of the page was black, and gave the cover a black background. Once that was done, I used the lettering tool (the little sideways A) and Segoe Print Bold for the title, and Tiger Rag LET for the Author Byline. Lettering was white.

After that, I opened the artwork I’m using as a common background in the series, as a layer, and used the move tool in the Toolbox to position it. When I was happy with the way it was looking, I selected the ‘Image’ tab, and then clicked on the ‘Autocrop Image’ option in the resulting drop-down. I also made sure the background art layer was positioned above the Background layer, and below the Title and Byline layers.

I purchased the little starship image from Andreus over at Dreamstime, and opened it separately to the cover, so it had a window of its own. The first thing I did after opening it was to click the ‘File’ tab, and then click ‘Save as’, so I could save the image with the word ‘isolated’ in the title.

This image comes with a very nice background, which I didn’t want to use, so I had to separate it. I did this by selecting ‘Scale Image’ on the ‘Image’ tab drop-down, making sure the chain between width and length was UN-broken, and then changing the longest side to 525 px. This meant that the shortest side also changed in proportion. (If you don’t do this, then you won’t get all your cut-out image on the clipboard, which is really frustrating.)

After that, I used the ‘Zoom’ tool (magnifying glass) in the Toolbox, to magnify the image so I could see the individual pixels. Once I was happy I could see the whole image, I then used the ‘Free select tool’ (the loop of rope) in the Toolbox to draw a line around the starship, and some of the engine afterglow.

(This is done by clicking the mouse pointer around the edge of the image that you’re going to cut, so it leaves a line of dots – which are linked by a line. When you get back to the start, just click on the first dot and an outline will form.)

Once the figure was outlined, I then clicked on the ‘Edit’ tab, and clicked on ‘Cut’ in the resulting drop down. This caused the outlined ship to vanish from the screen and split the image into two layers: the layer left behind, and the layer cut out. The cut out layer appears in the clipboard, which can be found under the ‘Brushes Dialogue’ in the ‘Tool Options’ box.

To get the image back into the picture, you just left click the clipboard and drag it back into the main screen. Once it is in the main screen, you can position it using the ‘Move’ tool from the Toolbox, by clicking and dragging.

To make the background disappear, select the layer, and click on the eye symbol beside it. When the eye is invisible, the layer cannot be seen, and your isolated image will stand alone.

Remember to resize the image to its original specs, save the image, and close it.

To import the image into your cover, you need to go to the cover image that you have open, click ‘File’, and then click ‘Open as Layers’ and find your saved isolated image. Select it, and it will appear in your cover screen. You will notice it adds two layers to the Layers – Patterns window: the isolated image, and the background you have made invisible.

Move the image around on your cover until it is positioned where you want it to be.

I did two more things before calling the cover finished. The first was to use the erase tool to blur the edges of the flames form the engines. I did this by selecting one of the dots with blurry edges in the brushes box, and then adjusting the opacity of the brush in the ‘Tool Options’ box to about 57 per cent, then I rubbed at sections of the outline until I was happy with the effect. The second, and final, thing I did was to click on the ‘Colors’ tab, and then select the ‘Brightness – Contrast’ option, and adjust both settings until I was happy with the clarity of the writing on the cover.

Et voila!