[Now with paragraph breaks!]

I promised Bam a blog post after I finished moving, so here I am with the cover for Seducing the Hermit.

The author is Suz deMello, with whom I’ve worked before, and bless her heart—she specifically requests my cartoon covers, AND she is one of the very few whose books actually justify the illustration style.

The last time I worked with Suz was for the cover The Wilder Brother, and we went through so many drafts doing that cover that I decided to skip all the potential communication problems and read the manuscript for myself. I normally don’t do this as I often have too much to do and too little time, and I don’t like to read a lot of what’s out there, but it’s different with Suz. I really liked The Wilder Brother, and it turns out, I really liked Seducing the Hermit, too. The manuscript was clean and tight, even before it went into editing, and reading it was actually more a fun break than research work for a cover. Reading Suz is never a chore.

The important thing? I had the entire story in my head now, along with all the character descriptions. It was time to work.

I imagined the scene I wanted to illustrate, which was the funnier one of two Suz suggested and which happens very early in the book. Simply put, the California blonde heroine loses control as she drives her overpacked VW bug off a ferry, onto an Alaskan fishing pier, and into the hunky Asian hero and his truck.

The first thing I did was search for references for my sketches—for guys falling back, kicking, or leaping and for Volkswagen bugs. These were the references I used:

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Please welcome Emma Petersen, the Managing Artist of Cobblestone Press

This is what I started with

Unfortunately as cover artists we only have so many photos to work with. And since websites that provide reasonable, quality, royalty free photographs aren’t as plentiful as some of us would like, we do have to be creative while manipulating our photos.

I have a hard time finding pictures of women with red hair. Either the model is looking directly into the camera (a personal pet peeve of mine) or she just doesn’t have the it factor I’m looking for.

For example, I received a cover art request form that called for a heroine with red hair and green eyes. So the first thing I did was go through my Red Hair Heroine light box. None fit so I searched for a redhead that fit was a reasonable fit of the author’s description.

Finished product

Of course, it’s rare you find a photograph that fits the author’s description perfectly so you have to tread a fine line while searching. The most time I will take searching for a photo is an hour.

I came across this picture. She was perfect, her features, her expression. She looked vulnerable, pensive and a little scared. And she had an appealing look that would enhance any cover. Only problem? She didn’t have red hair.

As an artist if I can’t find it, I must create it by manipulating the photo while making sure it doesn’t look like it’s been altered.

Are you a cover artist and have a cover you want to show off? Email me and I’ll hook you up!

[Lyn Taylor designed the cover of Prime Suspect by KS Augustin, available at Total E-bound.]

[click image for a larger version]

A lonely being in a lonely galaxy…Heron Meed has two strikes against it. It is an hermaphrodite in a galaxy dominated by two-gendered beings. And it’s a convicted criminal.

After six years of incarceration, Heron is trying to start a new life, but that isn’t easy when so many avenues are closed to it. It finally finds a refuge of sorts on the Castor Xeni Orbital and a surcease from its pain in the arms of voluptuous Subah Doisson but then various systems on the Orbital start getting sabotaged. With a small engineering population, and Heron the only newcomer to the station, how can the hermaphrodite prove its innocence amid a sea of entrenched prejudice?

In KS Augustin’s Prime Suspect, the character filling the shoes of ‘Hero’ is an Hermaphrodite, so a full body shot was going to require a certain femininity about it. Unfortunately this is where my own tastes interfere. I like ‘manly’ men LOL, so the effeminate men just weren’t working for me. I kept coming back to the current image as it was fairly indiscriminate once I’d painted out the tattoo and it had a certain amount of secrecy to it.

The background is pretty straight forward. The earth shot was one of the first images that jumped out at me. It’s just layered over a black background – voila! Space. Looking at it now, I possibly could have added some stars but the Tech brush pretty much fills that void.

Originally I think I only had the hermaphrodite character portrayed on the cover. Then the publisher asked if I could try it with the female character. We couldn’t decide which we preferred, so I put them together. Luckily the lighting worked well and I just needed to darken the images and match their colour tones. I also liked how the couple fit together. There was chemistry, so to speak and they looked like two lonely people caught in the vastness of space.

To finish it off, I decided I’d better highlight the hermaphrodite twist so I simply added the symbol for male and female together. It was after the fact that I actually Googled to see if there was actually a universal symbol for hermaphrodites – which just happened to be what I’d made up anyway. Phew!

This cover was nice and straight forward. Kaz had put quite a bit of info into her Cover Request form, which was a nice change from the usual ‘whatever the artist feels is right’. The latter comment usually comes back to bight me on the butt

[You can see more of Lyn’s work here.]

Now that the perfect cover for a book has been created, it turns out to actually be not that perfect after all. After seeing a draft of the artwork, the author might catch a few things that are off, or maybe the art director feels a different look altogether would have a greater impact with readers. That’s when the artist gets to work fine-tuning her masterpiece.

Ch-Ch-Changes: Do-overs and D’ohs!

April: Sometimes I get lucky and nail a cover in the first draft; proclamations of worship and promises of chocolate will find their way into my e-mail inbox with a hearty “Squee!” These are nice, and I never get enough of them.

Other times I get questions, comments, and request for changes, which are not as nice but, depending on the author and the feedback, may or may not make a better cover. It’s hard to predict.

The author having an art or design background, for instance, isn’t always a good predictor. One would think it would help in every case, but that isn’t so; sometimes it makes them nit pickier and hard to work with because they feel they know better than the cover artist about what looks good. Having a writing degree myself, I can sort of understand the psyche; there have been times I would read a book and think, “I could have done better,” but at the same time, I don’t go around telling people how to write. Do I?

The point is that it’s hard to tell if the changes will actually make a better cover. You just hope that the changes they request are sound.

Frauke: While I’m happy if I don’t have to change everything, some covers wouldn’t be what they are thanks to the changes requested by the art department and/or the author.

After

Before

The art requests I fear most are these where the author did her-/himself several cover art drafts and sends them to me with the request to do the cover exactly the way they did. These authors aren’t allowed to design their covers themselves and feel now stuck with a cover artist they don’t really want. Everything I do is damned to be changed from the start, because I have my own style and my own vision. Here I’m very happy that there’s an art director or managing artist who steps in as third party - otherwise such a cover would never get finished.

Changes of another kind are re-designs of existing covers. Usually authors come to me on a private basis - after haven gotten the ‘okay’ from the publisher to have the cover designed by an outside artist. This is then really like a ‘before’ and ‘after’ show.

Anne: I’ll be frank — without input from my really awesome art directors, some covers just wouldn’t have come out right. There’s always a detail I miss or something not-quite-right about the design that my eyes don’t catch after having stared at the computer screen for too long. This is one of my favorite examples of that:

The concept stayed the same in both versions, but the final is a totally different execution that captures more of the sexual tension and noir feel of the story. I’ve heard some nice comments about it, so readers agree it’s a powerful image!

The Insanity of Being a Cover Artist - where *headdesk*ing can become an artform

Looming deadlines! Software glitches! More photos of semi-nude beefcakes than you can shake a cordless mouse at! The life of a cover artist is almost always hectic, with new projects every week keeping them busy. As rewarding as the job is, enough crazy stuff happens along the way to keep artists on their toes and glued to their computer chairs. To close off this weeklong tribute to The Cover Art, April, Frauke and Anne share some thoughts on the trade they love.

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As the old saying goes, “You can’t judge a book by its cover…but everyone sure loves a gorgeous cover when they see it!” (Or something along those means. *wink*) The responsibility of creating an eye-catchy cover rests on the shoulders of the graphic artist assigned to the project, and there’s usually much more involved in the process than most folks realize. Stockphotos have to be purchased, fonts licensed, a composition designed, typography set, etc. And etc. And etc. Hours of hard work and love go into making the perfect cover for a story, but the effort is always worthwhile to get a great comment from an author or reader.

Making Magic: The How’s, What’s and Why’s of Creating Covers

April: I should be exempt from ever having to tell how I made a cover. After all, more than anyone else I know, I’ve already described my step-by-step process countless of times—from cartoon covers like Charming the Snake and The Wilder Brother, to 3D covers like Passionate Destiny and Still Waters, to photo manipulation covers like Love and Magic, Bone Deep, and Laying a Ghost—and for all I know, I could have given away all my most valuable trade secrets in doing so.

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