Cover Art

Mr Orange

Mr Orange

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following on from @Montero's thread regarding cover design, i have a question for those that have designed their own cover (or provided the artwork for it): where did you get the artwork from? stock galleries, special commissions or somewhere else?
 
When I did Xlibris I had this ridiculous notion that they could read my book and come up with a great cover. They hesitated too long so I did up a rather crude artwork and sent to them and said do something like this, only better. They took that and put text on it. I said, 'Tell you what I'll get back.'

Anyway; long before this I was trying to construct and model a space-station; because my story takes place on that space-station. I did a two dimentional drawing in my cad software and then extruded that to 3d in my other cad software; yet felt that was inadequate. I joined second life and thought wow I could make and model that here-not; at least not without a few thousand dollars so I could have my own space to play in. I did the next best and got Opensim and a secondlife like browser and started from scratch and did the station and made some characters. Then I finally designed my main character and took some screen shots.

That became the cover for my first book.

Since then I've gone a bit further and used elements from the sim and some stock Nasa and Berkley space photos and use my Corel photopaint and using layers set out to fuse everything together and Corel Draw to create the text and import that onto the cover.

From those I've made the E-cover Paperback cover and dust jackets for hardcover. Definitely have no confidence in the POD cover designers. Although for Xlibris I just give the finished artwork and allow them to put in the text and their UPC image and logo.

I have recently used some stock photos to attempt to play with making covers, but it's not always that easy to find the right match for what I have in mind.

I have some background with pencil and ink art and have a few watercolor paintings I've done. But I'm still tempted to find an artist on some place like deviantart.com to do the work.

deviantart page with some of my work

I haven't updated that page in a while and I have a lot more I could put up there, but it represents a notion of my level of work.
 
Based on what I'd planned to do if I'd needed to do my own cover, I'd go for commission if you can afford it and if you know what you want. Because SFF often involves a singular vision, you might not get anything very satisfactory from stock images. Having said that, a stock image with a bit of photoshop artistry can work wonders with atmosphere.

And whatever you go for, don't ignore the importance of text. Choice of fonts can make the difference between looking cheap-and-obviously-SP, and professional. Text and art should look like part of one overall design concept, not a forced and doomed marriage.
 
@tinkerdan sounds like you have far more artistic skill than i do. i would need something stock that only required tinkering if i was to do it myself

@HareBrain, you mean i can't just use Times New Roman? what's the average cost for a commissioned piece?
 
Mr Orange said:
you mean i can't just use Times New Roman? what's the average cost for a commissioned piece?
Click to expand...

Well, you can. But unless the art is fab, I'd probably pass it by, because it would look like you didn't care. (I have seen good covers that use standard common fonts, but they looked like they'd been chosen because they work, rather than just for convenience.) But I might be one of a few who notices. As for cost, I don't know. Hopefully you'll get some other responses on that.
 
PM me your requirements, I'll see if I can do a free one for you. :)

Depends what you want. :)
 
so this is what Gary has just knocked up for me - which i'm really impressed with (both the speed with which he did it and the quality of it)

thanks a lot Gary! (y):)

so, if you're looking for a cover, why not PM Gary as he's pretty damn good at it...

34030
 
I dont see all images either, around 50% of posts with images just have [i!g] instead of a pic. I dont see this one either.
 
Yep, that works, looks nice
 
Its a good striking picture - but what is the genre?
My expectation from a night time photo of Westminster would be
Thriller
Politics
and from night time would be perhaps paranormal.
 
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