This week has been very busy for me. I’ve started work on the ARe charity campaign covers plus I have my regular workload. Busy, busy, busy. On Wednesday alone I did SIX covers! Some mockups, some finals.
I’ll be sharing some new covers on my website & portfolio soon so keep your eyes open.
All Romance ebooks is hosting a charity campaign for the Heart Association. 28 books published in the month of Feb.
Be sure to check it out @ All Romance ebooks.
I’ll post the finalized covers as they’re finished so keep your eyes on my website & portfolio for the first look!
I’ve been featured in an article/interview at Cover Cafe!
Behind The Scenes
With Amanda Kelsey – Graphic Artist
Cover Cafe is pleased to feature a new graphic artist and also one of our newest committee members, Amanda Kelsey. Amanda has an interesting bio and a definite flair for graphic design. She has created some beautiful and distinctive covers for ebooks and we are fortunate to have her expertise involved with the Cover Cafe annual contest. The only down side for Amanda is that she cannot vote on ballots featuring her cover creations. Welcome to Cover Cafe Amanda!
Q: What is your educational background and how did you become an illustrator for both print and ebooks? Which format is your favorite?
I have a bachelors degree in, believe it or not, theater arts. And actually I never studied graphic design or even had the idea to go into the field until much later. I have always been a creative person. Painting has been a hobby of mine since I was very young and I studied many forms of art throughout high school and college but always for the fun of it, never for a career choice, until about two years ago. I became involved in a small online writers group and through that I was educated about the electronic publishing industry. I began seeing ebook covers that inspired me and soon I met other artists. Not long after I tried designing a few test covers and found a new challenge. I love being a cover artist and I’m always reading books and tutorials to become better.
I didn’t start off applying for print work but sort of fell into it through chance. I really can’t say one or the other is my favorite. I do like the challenge of creating a print cover only because I haven’t had the opportunity to do many of them so far. But all my ebook designs are made to print specs so there is not much difference, to me, in the design process.
This past week has been quite busy. I received three assignments on the same day and all of them were due in one or two weeks. Luckily, I had nothing better to do.
Divided Hearts by Terry O’Reilly is a sequel to Awakening recently published by Aspen Mountain Press. Therefore, I wanted to give Divided Hearts a similar design as the cover I did for Awakening. I was able to use the same colors, textures, and font which really connected the designs. Even better, I found stock photos that fit in a similar layout as the first book. All this combined to create a recognizable connection between the two books. Even though this design was fairly simple it took me about 4 hours to complete the full res design.
Artifact by Melody Knight is one of my favorite designs so far. Part of the story takes place in New Zealand where the couple has some fun in a geothermal pool. I found the photo of the couple kissing and thought it would be great for a muted background. Merged with the image of the hot spring surrounded by trees it creates depth and adds to the sexy feel.
For the foreground, I chose the image of the nude female back. I smoothed the skin using a smudge technique I recently learned and adjusted the shadows and highlights with the burn/dodge tool. I also added some extra strands of hair to give it a wilder, realistic look. For the title, I added an outer glow in a soft green tone. Needless to say, this took a lot of time and was a lot of work but I really like how it turned out.
Another favorite design of mine is for Ominous Night by Tania Walsh, soon to be published by Mystic Moon Press. This short story is about a woman who hunts mutants. The author gave me some great descriptions of the setting and character and I did my best to create them. The background is an old building (supposed to be a dingy pub) surrounded by a wrought iron fence. I found the gate image, cleaned it up, darkened it a bit, and placed it in front of the building.
In the original foreground image, the woman had blonde hair and a pink t-shirt. I used the soft light function to change her hair color. Then I selected the pink shirt using the magnetic lasso tool. First, I desaturated the selection then I adjusted the hue/saturation with the colorize box selected. Using the burn/dodge tool I adjusted the highlights and shadows before rendering an light source.
I am extremely pleased with how this design turned out. I hope the author loves it as much as I do.
Happy Hump Day!
I just updated my site with four recent cover designs. The first one being Bitten to the Core by Robin Slick (seen on the left). This cover went through a number of test runs before this final design was accepted.
I started out with something much brighter and quirky. Though 
both my art director and the author liked the cover we all felt it just didn’t fit the story properly. The main character is an older woman, but more importantly she is an artist, funky and hip. So I went back to the drawing board. At first I went through a few ideas involving the artist standing in front of a canvas with an apple but then I thought about something the author had said. She really liked the idea of black and white with hints of red. So I found a piece of abstract art and a female figure with the right attitude.
The original stock pieces were in color so I changed them to black and gray, adjusted the levels, and ran the cover through an action designed to create the urban illustrated look. Finally, I added the text and the apple core. Even then the cover went through some minor tweaks, I gave the female some black curly hair, I changed the font color, and the apple was originally vector style but that was changed, and the placement of both the apple and the text was adjusted slightly. It was a lot of work but in the end the author was really pleased.
Jackie Smart was a very fun cover to design. It was a simple color change but it took a while to find exactly the right image. The author wanted a woman unbuttoning her blouse to show the top of her red bra. 
The original image was pink and blue and not at all the image of a sophisticated business woman.
The scene was supposed to take place in a seedy sort of bar so I added atmosphere by inserting a bar scene in the background. You can’t really see it but it helps give the right feeling. The final addition, and I think the best part of the cover, was the font and placement of the title. Obviously, I matched the color to her bra which I think gives it that extra Umph! I have to say it is one of my favorite covers so far.
For A Taste of Summer Magic I followed the suggestion of the author and publisher to have the two men as images in the steam of a cauldron. In this story the heroine practices Wicca and in one scene she casts a spell.
I played with a number of different compositions and stock photographs but eventually settled on the one to the right. I liked having the female in the foreground and in the photo I chose the woman had such a flirtatious lustful look I thought it was perfect.
I used swirl brushes on overlay and set to a low transparency on the bottom and in the corners. These gave the cover an extra magical feeling that highlighted the font.
Both the authors and the publishers were very happy with the end results of both designs.
Awakening by Terry O’Reilly
This cover was my second historical gay romance, they must be the most difficult genre to work with. The first reason being the lack of quality stock art. It is hard enough to find homosexual stock photos but when you add the historical element it is almost impossible. For that reason I needed to cheat a bit with this one.
The story takes place in Massachusetts in the colonial period (1735), one of the characters is a teacher with light colored hair and a slender build and the other is a master cooper, slightly tan with dark hair and a broad build. I think the models I chose fit the description well.
I cleaned the edges using my graphics tablet. Next, I changed them from RGB to black & grey to get rid of the original coloring then I switched back to RGB and used the color selector to get their skin tone the right color. Next, I positioned them and used a variety of layers set to overlay, darken, or soft light to give the right contrast and a more antique look.
To give a more historical feel I found an image of a antique writing which I experimented with but ultimately used only on the background figure.
All in all, I think it is a really nice design and though it may not scream historical it certainly doesn’t shout contemporary either.
