How We Did It - Cover Design

(Today's quote is not necessarily connected to the following post, but Samson wanted more spotlight.)

Three years ago, when The Rose and the Balloon came out, my designer guy (shout out to Latitude 40!) put together a post on how he did the cover. I remember reading it with no small fascination, just feeling so grateful that that beautiful cover was mine and that I didn't have to try to design it myself.

Still in awe. It's just so purty.

This time around, my hubby was the hero of the story. While he didn't design the whole cover start to finish, he was a tremendous help in getting the background picture of the wheel to where it is today. I am beyond grateful for all his help. And then it was just up to me to tweak some things and finalize the text for the end result.

After all the headaches, I was at the point where I wanted to release the cover and forget about it. I was happy with how it turned out, but I realized how much more picky I was since I was the one in charge of how it looked. It's so much easier to trust someone else's artistic eye and judgment on jobs like these.

Anyway, I can't forget about the cover (for very obvious reasons), and since I enjoyed reading the post linked above on how The Rose and the Balloon's cover was created, I figured you all would enjoy seeing how we created the cover for Spindle Dreams.

This was my original mock cover that I put together for inspiration as I worked on the book.

I did not own the copyright to the photo, so I knew I couldn't use that. Besides, the mock cover just looked too dark to me. I wanted something with more color, something that really matched the cover for The Rose and the Balloon.

So -- to start from scratch. I needed a new photo.

I knew I wanted a spinning wheel. I also knew it would be a lot more difficult to get a photo of a spinning wheel than it was to get a photo of a rose. For some reason, people enjoy their roses a lot more than they enjoy their spinning wheels. I began a long and pretty much fruitless search. Even when I found pictures of wheels, they were at awkward angles or looked too modern or had too much going on in the picture besides the wheel.

It was frustrating.

Until I saw a Facebook friend post a bunch of pictures of her new spinning wheel. It's almost impossible to describe how excited I was at that point. Immediately, I contacted her and asked if she'd mind if I used a picture of her wheel for my book cover. She didn't, and quickly sent me tons of pictures of the wheel from a million different angles.

This was the photo we settled on.

My husband has some experience in using GIMP to edit photos. I, on the other hand, had never heard of GIMP before he brought it up. I still don't know all that it does, so I'm not giving you guys a run-down now.

Obviously, the first step was to remove the background stuffs, since we wanted to try fire with the wheel.

Once all of that was blocked out and colored over with a nice, neutral, all-purpose slate color/texture/thing, my husband cleverly added the fire. I don't know if you can tell, but there's actually two layers of fire: one in front of the wheel, and another behind the wheel.

Once the wheel and fire were set, the next step was to adjust the color to best set off the text. This fell to me, and of course, I got super picky and couldn't decide on the exact brightness of the thing for... well, days. I'm really good at procrastinating when I don't like the job I have to do.

After that, it was just a matter of getting the text done. And voila! We had ourselves a book cover.

~*~

What do you think about Spindle Dreams's cover? Fellow authors out there, how do you design your book covers? Let me know below!

Important links to remember today:

• Add Spindle Dreams on Goodreads
• Follow me on Facebook

Don't forget that Spindle Dreams releases TOMORROW!

God bless!