Friday Post - Our Book Covers!

Hey, everyone! Welcome to today's Friday Post, where we share any random little tidbits or tips that we think of during the week. Today, we're going to show you how we make our book covers!

Dark Awakening - Emilie's Book Cover

     For my cover, I used Adobe Photoshop to make my cover for my book Dark Awakening. And funny story: I was going to make a kind of step by step process thingy but then I realized that my photoshop program was no longer on the computer. Oops.
     Well, I think I can remember everything, right?
     Okay, so, the first thing I do when I'm making a cover is finding a picture I like. I usually pick the most important thing in my book (For example, I used a wolf) and tried to find good pictures related to that. And narrowing it down to exactly what you want when searching Google is hard, but I normally keep my search pretty vague, like just "Wolf". You'd be surprised how many anime pictures will pop up, but whatever. Japan has officially taken over Google. No biggie.
     Now remember that you want to add "high definition" to your search, because if you don't find a high quality picture, it will turn out blurry.
     In the end, I came up with this:
   

     I usually download the fonts I want for the title from the internet since the default ones aren't necessarily always what I like. This is completely optional though; after all, this cover is being designed by you. I downloaded "A Charming Font". These downloads are free and reliable. I haven't had any bug or virus trouble after downloading them. :)
     When I have everything I need, I'll run my Adobe Photoshop program (which apparently decided to run away) I'll press "New" in the drop down list "File" and make a new project with the dimensions 8.5 and 11 in inches. (This is about the size of a piece of paper.)
     I normally just place my photo and mess around with it till I'm satisfied. I do a lot of cropping and adjusting. ;)
     Then I add the title. To pick a color for the title, I use the little eye dropper tool and find the color that is a little lighter than the most common color in the picture. (If that makes sense) Then to make the words even more prominent I go to "Layer Styles" and add a "Drop Shadow". Then I adjust the shadow so that it surrounds all of the words only slightly.
     MOST. DESCRIPTIVE. TUTORIAL. EVER.
     Anyway, once I've messed around with the controls a LOT, I finally come up with this:

Kablam.



Happily Never After - Patricia's Book Cover

Patricia, here. In the past two Monday's I've given you a small peek into my storyworld, and now I am going to give you a bit of insight on my book cover... And how it was made.

So, my book is called "Happily Never After", right? Kinda fairytale-gone-wrong-ish. The plot is (if you haven't guessed yet) about Princesses, and their paths crossing; and it's all tied together with a lovely prophecy. Prophecies just make everything better, amIright.

So, I went on bing, and typed in "Sad Princess".

Lots of pictures popped up... (I want to caution you, if your computer doesn't have a filter, DO NOT do this...) And I found one that I liked. After doing some checking to see if it was copyrighted, I discovered that it wasn't. (If it's copyrighted, don't even think about using it...)

Here is the original picture that I found:

I put it on my editing software (Adobe photoshop), and gave it my own twist:





Aaand, finally. I used my trusty app ('Fotor'), the final product looked like this:

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Well, that's a peek into our cover-creating process :)

Keep writing!

- ♥ Emilie and Patricia ♥