by Roseanna White | Mar 11, 2015 | 20th Century, Remember When Wednesdays
In my upcoming Ladies of the Manor Series with Bethany House, my main characters are largely comprised of the British nobility. And because of certain reasons, jewelry comes up rather often. For book covers and whatnot I’ve had to search out photos, so I thought it would be fun to share some of my visual aids here. =)
In book 1, The Lost Heiress, Brook has a necklace she wears all the time. It’s Victorian in its styling, with a gold filigree connecting two strands of pearls, with two dangling pearls from the filigree. Something sorta-kinda like this, though this image isn’t awesome.
But she inherits quite a bit more jewelry from her mother too. Like a ruby and diamond bracelet.
And an emerald and diamond necklace.
In book 2, The Reluctant Duchess, Rowena brings only one substantial piece of jewelry with her–a brooch with her family plaid.
She soon receives, however, the legendary Sussex ruby set. Which primarily features a ruby necklace that I envision to look something like this.
There’s a matching bracelet, but rather than those small earrings featured with this set (which is actually red crystals and not rubies, but you know–we’re just going for style here, LOL), I instead describe a dangling set…which Rowena can’t wear, not having pierced ears.
The earrings will, however, be borrowed by my heroine for book 3, Ella. (The book is tentatively titled The Waiting Lady, though that will likely change. Still noodling stronger, more provocative words than “Waiting”–ideas???) Anyhoo. I describe the earrings as having 3 rubies on each one, dangling in tiers. Kinda like these, though with an extra level.
Having not actually, ahem, written any of book 3 yet, I don’t know what other bling Lady Ella might end up with. 😉 But I have a definite love for the pretty baubles, so you can be sure something will come up. =)
by Roseanna White | Mar 9, 2015 | Word of the Week
This one made me go, “Ha! Take that, everyone who uses the word I don’t like!” 😉
See, I was always a
normality girl. But more and more often I’d begun hearing
normalcy. And it drove me batty. Here, my friends, is why.
Normality itself is a relatively new word, entering the written world of English in only 1849. It most likely came from the French normalité, which became a borrowed word in 1834. Meaning exactly what you’d expect.
Normalcy, however, dates from 1857. And what, you ask, did it mean? “Being at right angles.” It’s a mathematical term! In the 1920s President Harding used it in place of normality in a speech describing the political situation and was liberally made fun of for his incompetency with speaking. Since then it has edged its way in more and more, but “the word prefered by purists [read: Roseanna, LOL] for “a normal situation” is normality.”
So there. 😉
by Roseanna White | Mar 5, 2015 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
It’s been a crazy-busy week (aren’t they all?), and I wanted to take today to regroup, draw your attention to some things, and…well, frankly, go teach the canal class at my kids’ homeschool group. 😉
First of all, I want to announce the launch of the website for Roseanna White Designs! I finally bit the bullet and built a page specifically for my designing business. My favorite feature of the website is on the homepage–if you scroll down, there’s a testimonials section where the quote pops up as you hover over the thumbnail image that it goes with. Super fun!
Another fun aspect that I hope will set it apart from some other websites is my Behind the Design blog that’s attached–and which will have all the behind-the-scenes posts I do here too. =)
But there was something else that launched this week too–Dauntless, the young adult medieval romance/adventure written by my good friend, critique partner, and fellow editor at WhiteFire, Dina Sleiman!
To celebrate the launch, Bethany House is offering a truly awesome giveaway, which includes as first prize a cute heart-and-arrow necklace and a $250 Amazon gift card (woot!), and as second prize, a bow and arrow set and a leather backpack! Check out the giveaway!
by Roseanna White | Mar 4, 2015 | Uncategorized
I’ve been having a blast with designing–no secret, I know–and I owe a lot of my new business to one person: Sandi Rog. Sandi has been a friend for years, though we’ve only met in person once. We met through a historical group that shot off from ACFW, focusing on books set in Europe. Became friends. When Jewel of Persia was about ready to debut, I asked Sandi if she would edit it for me, knowing she was a freelance editor. That was, unfortunately, right about the time she discovered she had cancer. She hadn’t been diagnosed yet, but the symptoms were appearing. She persevered on that edit and had her best friend (a fellow editor) help out too, because she takes her promises seriously.
Since those days, WhiteFire has published one of Sandi’s books, her best friend has become our non-fiction editor, and that simple online friendship has deepened and grown. And Sandi has become one of my most vocal cheerleaders when it comes to my designing. She recommends me to absolutely everyone, and quite a few of those everyones follow her advice. So a big, big thanks to Sandi!
Naturally then, when she asked if I would design a cover for a novella she was working on–the first book she’s written since cancer–I said, “Of course!”
And so we got to work. =) The book is set in the late Victorian era and is called Out of the Ashes–those ashes being from the Great Chicago Fire. Sandi described her heroine for me and said she wanted her in a nice dress.
Sometimes I start with a model. But in this case, I knew the tricky part would be clothing, so I actually started with a public domain image of a dress from the correct era.
I really liked the detail on the back of this, and the dress has a nice sheen, which denotes it as an evening gown, despite the long sleeves. I knew Sandi wanted the dress to be blue, but for now, I was just happy to find a gown. I flipped it and deleted the background.
Then came the process of making the dress blue–Sandi had specified royal blue, so I knew what my goal was. I did this by going into Layer / Adjustments / Color Balance…several times. Increasing the “blue” each time until I ended up with this.
Then came finding a person to put into the dress. =) As usual, I searched for a bride that fit her heroine’s description, since they often have their hair up. I also needed one in a very particular pose, to fit into the dress. I found this one relatively quickly.
As usual, my first step with her was to delete all the background–and in this case, her dress.
Don’t you just love this step? So funny to see someone missing their body, LOL. So then we play dress up, and I put the girl behind the now-blue dress to see how they line up.
At this point I also sized her to fill the page but leave room for a background. Of course, we were missing a hand…a problem, but I would deal with that later, I decided. For now, I was just pleased that the head and neck were at the right angle to be coming out of that dress. Yay! So I went searching for a background. I didn’t know how literal the “ashes” part was, but I decided to go for some nice ruins and chose this background.
Then made it more mysterious (woooooo) by making it night.
Not bad…but I added some smoke effects. ‘Cause you know. Fire. Ashes. Smoke…
(This is just a free smoke texture that some lovely designer offered to other designers.) I liked how this obscured the background…but she looked weird in front of it like that. So I duplicated the layer, moved it in front of her, and deleted all but a wisp.
Better! I really liked this, other than the still-missing hand. 😉 So I added a title in the font hilariously called “The Last Font I’m Wasting on You” (with a script for the “little words”). And Sandi’s name, which combines two fonts–The Alistaren Beta for the first letters, and plain ol’ Times New Roman for everything else.
The hand was still missing, but I went ahead and sent this to Sandi for an initial reaction. Which was that she loved it–and wanted me to save that background and smokiness for a later book in the series–but this one needed to be in a ballroom. Brightly lit. Oops, LOL. She gave me some direction on said ballroom–she wanted stairs–and off I went to search it out. You’d be surprised how few of these there are! But I eventually found this one.
Quite a different feel, eh? 😉 Quick substitution, and I got this.
In this version, I did a quick alteration on the dress, just to see what we could do about that hand…and make it look more traditionally “evening.” By simply deleting the sleeves and the part of the dress covering her arm, I suddenly had a realistic pose. I sent it again to Sandi, who asked me to keep the background out of the blue tones and wanted some more alterations on the dress.
In hunting down other dresses from the era I love, I came across my all-time favorite Worth gown.
I’m not sure I can adequately express how much I adore this dress, LOL. And it’s even from a similar angle. So I decided to borrow some of the styling queues for my adjustments and created a similar arm/neckline area.
This looked promising! So I redressed my lovely lady, kept the original tones of the photos, added just a touch of bluing at the bottom to make her name stand out, a glow around “Ashes” for the same reason…and we had it.
Sandi was in love, and so was I. Absolutely adore how this one turned out…even if redesigning that dress did stretch my abilities. =) Feedback thus far has been very positive, and everyone agrees that it screams “Christian historical romance!” which is exactly what we want it to do.
Sandi posted a description of the story here.
Whatcha think?
by Roseanna White | Mar 2, 2015 | Word of the Week
I say it a lot, just to be cute. Aw, shucks. Every time I type it, I add an imaginary foot shuffle. No doubt inspired from some cartoon.
But it never occurred to me to wonder where it came from. When I looked it up, it was kinda a “duh” moment.
Appearing in writing in 1847 in two different sources, shucks comes directly from shuck. I’m familiar with shuck as a verb–shucking corn, shucking oysters. Said verb is from 1819. The noun actually predates it by several hundred years, tracing its appearance back to the 1670s and meaning “a pod, a shell.” Something discarded.
The interjection Shucks! then comes from this idea of it being a toss-away. It’s kind of like saying, “Nonsense.” or “It’s nothing.” One of those first appearances in 1847 was actually “not worth shucks.”
So there we have it. =) Hope everyone has a great first week of March…though as usual, the end of February took me totally by surprise.
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Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. Having successfully launched two homeschool grads, she now spends her time writing fiction, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years, as well as a fantasy series and contemporary mysteries and romances. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary. 