Shayla’s (Mis)Adventures in Coverland PART 2

As promised, my friends, here is part two of my adventures in Coverland.
Last time I stopped at the point where I decided I needed to see my cover from a different approach. As a result, I oriented towards a more abstract/vectorish looks. No more stock photos for me.
At first I wanted to have a microphone as the focus of my cover, but I soon changed my mind. I didn’t find microphone illustrations for commercial purposes, I didn’t find brushes that I liked. So I said “Never mind, i’ll just do something cute, even though it might be unrelated with the story.”
That’s how this cover was born:

I used a free commercial font, a free music notebook texture and flower brushes that I made myself.

After I shared it with my friends, they all commented on the pink. no pink for us, lady, thank you very much.  *Sigh*

No biggie, I’ll make it purple.

Basically all I did was play around with layer modes, hue-saturation, curves, etc. I liked it a lot. Deb commented on the flowers though. now that they popped, she suddenly realized they had no place in the pictures. It made no sense for them to be there.

I didn’t really understand her logic, I admit, but I’d rather trust someone else’s opinion than my own when it comes to unexplored territories, and this was definitely an unexplored territory for me.

So I took the flowers out and came back to the main idea of my book. What was my book about? Two best friends. One of them is singer that uses his unrequited love to fuel his passion for music, the other one comes out for him in the end. It’s that simple.
I thought I could convey this with the use of the rainbow’s colors and some music notes.
I made various versions of the cover, some of which I have deleted . Here’s what I kept.

I apologize, but I’m too tired now to modify the damn HTML so the pics show in one row. I swear I’m sick of blogger. It may be easy to customize sometimes, but other times…

Anyway, end of rant, back to topic. I again showed these to Deb. She pointed out that having some guitar picks and drums would be better. I didn’t agree with this one because they had very little to do with the story. She even showed these covers to her students and they all agreed on the third from those above I believe. I’m not sure exactly because I deleted a few.

At this point I showed the cover to Vess. Vess immediately said she thought it was too dark. She suggested I enlarge and right (righten?) the heart in the middle. cange the layer mode a bit. This is how I came with the above fifth cover.

Well, Deb was very very helpful. But I felt that the cover had a too many things thrown on top of each other. I returned to the initial idea of something simpler.

It was then that Vess saved me again. She showed me a wallpaper with a rose and a text in a circle. It looked gorgeous, simple. Beautiful. I thought about it a little and I decided I could do something similar. With the use of a rose picture I had with my own garden roses and a few free brushes, I made this:

Vess loved it. But “What’s the blood got to do with it?” she pointed out. Oops. Maybe I shouldn’t so obviously point at bleeding heart. some might take it literally and confuse it with a mystery story.

So I changed it. unfortunately I deleted the last file. I had a few falling petals, but they fell upside down. I noticed it thanks to Vess again. In the end, I corrected the mistake, deleted a bit more of the gray area, and ended up with this:

So, this is my final cover. I did not write “an LL story” or something like that as other authors did, simply because I forgot. I wanted to be done with it, otherwise, knowing me, I knew I’d end up tweaking it endlessly.

So, this was the story of my first self-made cover.

What I learned from this experience?

First and foremost, NEVER do it alone. I had three awesome friends who helped build this: Louise, Deb and Vess, who all pointed out my mistakes and gave priceless advice. I would have ended up with a mess if not for them.

Secondly, go with your first instincts.
From the start, I wanted something simple and minimalist. No matter how many ideas I bounced back and forth with everyone, no matter how many versions I came up with, I was still attracted to the simple cover. I could have saved myself a lot of time and effort and spared my friends a lot of eye rolls and huffs if I’d just stuck to my first thought and worked around that.

Third, if you don;t know what you’re doing, go with simple. I might not have the greatest cover. But for a beginner, I think it looks good. As long as it’s simple, your rookie mistakes will be reduces to a minimum. It won’t be so noticeable that you have no idea what you’re doing. Monochromatic is also a good way to avoid bad result. As you can see, I went with both to minimize my risks LOL

If you can make it free, go with it. You can have a cute cover even for little or no money. for this cover I made my own rose brush from a photo. I used free for commercial use font from 1001fonts.com (click the green dollar button) and free for commercial use brushes from Obsidian Dawn .

Lastly, don’t forget to give credit, even if it’s not required, for the resources you use. It’s common sense.

Well, thanks a lot for following me through my adventure. I’d be honored if you’d like to share your covers with me.

Lots of hugs and kisses,
Shayla

Shayla’s (Mis)Adventures in Coverland or How I learned making covers is not that easy (gah!) – PART I

Sorry for the long title 😛

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog. Huge apologies to everyone who’s following. In case you were curious, yes, I’ve been busy writing. My story for Love’s Landscapes, Only you, is complete. Edited, revised, revised again, and again, and again, you name it. I really hope you guys will enjoy it.

So, this year I wanted to put a lot more effort into the process and decided to make my own cover as well. I didn’t want to hire anyone to do it. I wanted it to be much more personal than that. However, I never expected it would be so hard to decide on an actual cover. And some point I was so frustrated I was ready to give up. Let me show you why (and keep in mind that this is the abbreviated version :D):

First, I thought I should buy stock image that would fit the mood of my story. Since my prompter was inspired by this song, Say Something (I’m giving up in you) by A Great Big World ft. Christina Aguilera – a super sad song in case you don’t know – I figured I would use a photo that would give off that feeling. So I searched pics with guys walking away, autumn inspired pics, depressed guys, and, generally black and white backgrounds.
Here are just a few I found particularly inspiring:

Of, course, there were a lot more to choose from. But as I started writing , I realized it wasn’t my thing. I would never be the kind of writer that would write something particularly dramatic or angsty. I’m all for the cute and fluffy. No matter how sad the subject of unrequited love was, I knew I would eventually end up with a fun and cute story. A depressing cover would definitely not be fit.

On to plan B then. I figured I needed something to suggest the pain of love and loneliness, but at the same time have a hopeful message. So, I thought the best way to go about it was to find a cover with a heart somewhere in the middle. 

My scavenger hunt for lonely hearts proved to be very rewarding. It turns out there are hundreds of images with hearts as the focal points.

Here are some I really liked.

This is where I got serious. I really loved the pic with the rose petals. even though it was in low resolution I could really see its potential once I would buy it. I did a Google image search and confirmed it hadn’t been used as a romance cover before so I made a mock cover. 

 I wasn’t decided on the title and just put something in there.
I posted this mock cover on the writers group on Goodreads and got lots of advice.

I used those pieces of advice and tweaked my cover some more:

 And then some more:

Still, I wasn’t satisfied. Like several peeps from the group pointed out, the writing was too small. However, the image was already way loaded. If my typing would have been bigger than that, I felt that the beauty and simplicity of the image would have been lost. Sadly, as much as I loved the pic, I had to let this one go  T_T

I reoriented myself towards another image and made this cover:

Again with the same issue. My typesetting just didn’t fit. Too small. It didn’t pop out. It didn’t leave a strong impression. In other words, amateurish. I was definitely not satisfied. 

But I’m a stubborn person.

Switching to plan C, the most radical so far. I decided I’d make two totally different covers and ask my friends for help in choosing the right one.

The first one was meant to be cute, but also very minimalist and airy, so there would be enough space for the typesetting to be big without crowding the picture. 

I wanted to convey the image of a guy giving his heart to another guy. That, however, wouldn’t have fit the minimalism criterion at all. Not to mention it would have been way too hard to find an image like that. I could have tried painting the guys, but I suck at digital art, so, I immediately dismissed that fleeting thought. 

The best alternative I could come up with was to concentrate just on the hands. By this time, I also had my title picked. This sounded promising. I searched for some hands pics, one holding a heart and another one receiving it. Unfortunately, at that time I didn’t find the best stock ever (after a couple of weeks, I did, but it was already too late) and here’s the result:

At this point, like I said, I was consulting my friends. One of them, Vess, said she didn’t like the font. She also suggested putting my name under the title or, either way, make it centered. I followed her advice:

Much better, right?
The problem was that this cover did not satisfy my other two friends, Deb and Louise. Deb, especially, really disliked the hands at the bottom of the cover.

Meanwhile, I had the second option available. I thought to myself, “Ok, cute doesn’t seem to work. Let’s try sexy.” So I picked a really gorgeous hunk image. But I, again, wanted to connect the image with the title of the story. So I decided to put a heart on his chest, make it look like a tattoo.

It was guaranteed this would turn out awesome. I mean, who doesn’t love a naked guy? Sadly, like Deb pointed out, naked guys are so last year. Plus, my tattoo wasn’t very convincing (that was not my fault; his chest is way too flat. No matter how much of a distortion filter I applied it would not stretch further).
Vess loved this one, but she also agreed that between the naked hunk and the previous cover, the one with the hands, the most original one was the first choice.
Louise was the most smitten with this one. She only suggested changing the font. Just to please her, I did.

But, I had pretty much figured it out that this cover was hopeless too.

Ok, sweet pics wouldn’t work. Naked hunks were outdated. What was I going to do? Give up ad hire a pro, or stick with the group cover, which was guaranteed to be gorgeous?
But, how could I give up when I had already reached so far?

It was all or nothing. I decided to completely switch gears and try a vectorish look. My last chance at making my cover. I was determined if plan D would also not work, then, and only then, I would give up.

In part II I’ll talk about my next series of misadventures in coverland. That is, if you till haven’t gone insane by the time you’ve reached the end of this post 😛

Hugs and kisses,
Shayla