I make covers for an online writing community, Figment, and I absolutely love doing it. I thought it’d be interesting to start a blog to show what exactly goes into making these covers. I believe in doing simple covers; nothing too busy or colorful. I believe covers should be clean looking. I typically stick to the same style when making covers, but that’s because I really like the style. I’ve been making covers for over a year, and I’ve found my own groove and look to my covers – it’s like my signature is subliminally woven into the cover. It’s been a dream of mine to do this for a living, but in the meantime, I’ll just play around with some images found on Pinterest and have fun doing it. (:
The other day, I had a user come to my profile and ask for a cover. She was writing a story for a contest, and needed something eye catchy. The story sounds really interesting, and it has a very unique concept. Anyway, short story short (after all, it is a short story), it’s about two twins who can travel in time – sort of. One lives during the day time and travels to the next morning by skipping over nighttime, and then the other twin does the same but lives during the night and skips days. Make sense? Anywho, without giving away the whole story, I’ll get on to the cover.
The author wanted something that had to do with night and day, and maybe include the twins if that were possible. So I searched and search Pinterest to no avail, and then tried Weheartit. Again, no such luck. I couldn’t figure out what to do with the cover: should it of a city that has one half day and the other night? ‘Cause I sure did find tons of pictures with that description, but it didn’t quite sit right with me.
I was scanning through my downloaded photos (which if anyone is curious, I have over 1,100 pictures), and I stumbled across two photos that I had snatched from Pinterest a week ago thinking, “Gee, maybe I could use these for a cover/covers one day.” And boy was I happy I saved those! Here they are:
I thought these pictures were perfect for the cover! The twins have blonde hair, and the clothes they are wearing in the pictures totally symbolize the whole day/night time-traveling-tracks each of them are stuck on. So, I opened them both up in Paint and cut/pasted them into the same file. I reversed the picture of the girl in the black dress so that way they were leaning toward each other ‘cause it looked weird when they were both leaning in the same direction. Then I trimmed down the sides so they would fit the formatting I would needed it for, and I stretched the bottom of the picture so I would have the perfect canvas for placing the title when the time came. The area above the archways would be perfect for the author name, so I left that area alone.
After I was all done editing the photos together with some color merging so they laid together practically seamlessly, I was ready to add the title and author name. I uploaded the merged photo onto Mybannermaker (I absolutely love the site) and threw on the text with a simple, black font that I use for most of my book covers. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the final product:
Unfortunately, it’s a pretty small size, but this is the size formatting for Figment. I tinted it slightly the cover brown because I thought it could stand to be darkened a bit, and I chose that color because I typically tint my photos a color on the orange-yellow scale because it makes colors more vibrant. It turned out a little pixellier than I would’ve liked, so if anyone knows how to fix that little issue, be my hero and leave me a comment on how to fix that. (;
This is just one of the four covers I made yesterday, and probably my favorite out of the four. Maybe I’ll share the other ones another time, but for now, I need to go and make myself a big cup of hot cocoa and make some more covers!
Cheers!
Here’s is the link to the story this cover was made for: http://figment.com/books/449642-Liliana
