AQATWA remains a big book. My manuscript... has not gotten smaller. One beta has already commented on the multiple subplots, and made some suggestions for scenes that could be cut. We'll see, because it depends on how necessary/unnecessary they still think those scenes are once they've reached the end of the book.
Anyway, it's time to reveal... the cover. Well, at least a prototype for the cover.
No wait, let me tease you first and talk about terrible covers. Mainly, mine.
Embarrassingly, for all the time I have spent faffing around with Poser and Photoshop, I have spent quite a lot of time figuring out how to do some highly specific and obscure task, like warping text or creating fire effects, and very little time studying the basics of composition and color theory. I kind of knew what a color wheel was, but never actually paid attention to how they are applied.
Which why I created abominations like my first cover.
Aside from the crappy Photoshop job (don't ask me why I couldn't be bothered to even fix that white artifact on Alexandra's pants leg), whatever possessed me to use yellow font on a green background? Yeah, seriously, I had no idea about contrast, triadic color schemes, etc.
I didn't do much better with the next few books.
So anyway, although I have commissioned quite a few pieces of art for AQATWA, I'm back at the Poser hacking, and I renewed my subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud, so maybe now I will actually try to learn something about color schemes, blending, layers, all that good stuff. But the fact remains, as a digital artist, I'm a pretty fair writer.
So, below the cut is the cover image I commissioned from Katerina Ventova. The art is her work, but the title and author text is mine. I think I chose an appropriately contrasting color this time, and the font size and positioning looks okay to me, but I have a terrible eye for these details, so if there are any typographic designers out there, please speak up and tell me what I can do to make it look better.
This is never going to be a commercial release, of course, but I'd like to at least get my covers a bit more polished.
Leventart, by the way, did a beautiful job, I think, so feel free to click to her DeviantArt page and give her some love. (Or commission her!)
Commission: Alexandra Quick by Leventart on DeviantArt