New cover design ~ Thursday, March 15, 2007
Giselle suggested that I use one of the Waterhouse paintings that I had incorporated into a little calendar I made a while ago in my design of a new cover. It's a great idea--particularly since Waterhouse's work is now in public domain! Yippee! (You can click on the image for a larger version of the picture--but you may have to do so more than once, because it seems to want to take you to the first photo I posted on blogger instead. At least it does when I first click on the images. So then you have to go back to the blog and click again and it seems to work. I'll have to look into why this happens at some point).
Of course, once I created the original layout and design for the cover, it wasn't too much more work to use some other Waterhouse images that are somewhat appropriate in order to create the other two covers as well! So, I did. Now I just have to clean up the actual books for which the covers can be used.
I actually suspect that Waterhouse used the same model for the first and the third image. The middle one is actually an Ophelia painting and may have used a different model, but I had been playing around with it in Photoshop (trying to figure out how it works, but without any manuals or guides. Gotta get me some of those), so her face is less defined and could concievably be the same character. Heh. I think the protagonist's hair is red at the moment, so I'll have to change that for this "edition" of the books. Maybe make her eyes a different colour instead...
I haven't figured out how to use Photoshop yet (which is annoying. I'll get to it soon), so I designed it in Photodraw, which doesn't allow you to figure out or specify what dpi you want (at least, not that I could find). Frustrating also. So, I'm not sure how it will look in print (they recommend a 300 dpi file--I'm guessing this is well below that).
At any rate, I don't intend to order print/proof copies yet, since I'll wait till the others arrive first, go through them and make the appropriate fixes and corrections to the content. Then I'll order my proofs from that and see if the cover renders all right or not! But I do like the overall look of this new cover, at least.
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