Cover Design ~ Love in Three Quarter Time

by Roseanna White | Jan 24, 2018 | Books, Cover Designs

Time for another peek behind the cover design process! This time, I’m featuring one that won’t be all that involved. As designs go, it was pretty simple. Which is why I’m featuring it today, as I’m short on time. 😉

Rachel McMillan is best known for her historicals, but she occasionally puts on a contemporary novella, and I’m always thrilled when she comes to me for the cover. =) Last year I designed a cover for a Christmas novella duo in which she and Allison Pittman each wrote a story.

This year, Rachel has Love in Three Quarter Time releasing on Valentine’s Day.

Her wants were pretty simple. The heroine, face not visible, and Vienna in the background. She gave me some great photos for inspiration and even the name of a few buildings she’d like to see on the cover. And as a comparable cover, she recommended this (and other covers for Carla Laureano):

 Armed with nice, decisive information like this, I hit Shutterstock with confidence. It’s always so much easier to design a cover when the author knows exactly what they want!

My first hunt was for a model that fit the description of Rachel’s main character. Rachel described her as having shoulder length dark hair, cut in a curly bob. She tends to wear turtleneck sweaters, knee high boots, tweed, cardigans…”classic librarian.” I went searching for such lovely ladies with their faces averted and happened pretty quickly upon this one.

 Not bad! Happy with that as a starting place for Evelyn, I next turned to images of Vienna. Anything from historical Vienna would do, but I began by looking for images of the Staatsoper (opera house), upon Rachel’s recommendation. And there were some GORGEOUS photos of this building at sunset. This is the one that caught my eye.

Putting the two together was pretty simple. The only real tweaks I had to make were to delete a few flyaway hairs and add some lighting to the model, which gave me this.

I wanted to punch the lighting up a little bit though, so I added the Hudson filter…

Satisfied that this was a good base, I added some faded color layers to give me a good place for the words…

And then added the title and author. Now, I’d just purchased this super-gorgeous font called Monstera that I was dying to use…especially since I’d FINALLY figured out how to access all the pretty alternates (I’m embarrassed by how long it took me to actually read the how-to included with all these fonts I’ve downloaded. For reference, on a PC, hit the Start button and type “Character Map.” Click on that, and up will pop a screen like this…

Just click on the version of the letter you like, click Select, and then Copy, and paste directly into where you want to use it–in my case, the text layer in Photoshop. Ridiculously simple.)

So as you can see in the image above, I played around with the various forms of each letter until I landed on this.

This was almost, almost there. But I wanted a little something more. A flourish. Something to pull the music theme of the title (Vienna is where the waltz originated) into the cover. So I found this pretty little musical flourish…

I put my choice of this set behind the title, and it added just the touch I was looking for! I showed it to Rachel, and she declared it exactly what she was looking for. Yay! So here’s the final:

So here’s some more about the story.

A romantic waltz through a city filled with music, passion and coffee.

Evelyn
Watt fell in love with Austrian marketing director Rudy Moser the
moment he stepped into their Boston firm. With his ice blue eyes and
chocolate-melting accent, he is as refined as she imagines his home
country to be. When Evelyn finds herself unexpectedly unemployed right
before Christmas, she is left with an unknown future until Rudy steps in
with a job appraising, assessing and cataloging heirlooms, lending her
American vernacular to the translated descriptions to give each item
international appeal. Evelyn will live in Vienna for the months leading
up to a grand auction at a party held in conjunction with the Opera
Ball—on Valentine’s Day.

Vienna is a magical blend of waltzing,
antiques, and bottomless cups of Einspanner coffee at the Café Mozart.
When a secret from Rudy’s family’s past blows in with the winter chill,
Evelyn is forced to confront how well she knows the object of her
affection. Her café tablemate, the gruff and enigmatic Klaus Bauner
might be the only person who holds the key to Rudy’s past. But could
that key also unlock her future? In the days leading up to the Opera
Ball, Evelyn finds herself in the middle of the greatest romance of her
life…as long as she doesn’t trip over her two left feet.

You can pre-order this from Amazon now, and it’ll download to your Kindle on 2/14!

What do you think of the cover? Do you like the feel? The setting, the face-averted heroine?

Cover Design ~ String of Pearls by Melody Carlson

by Roseanna White | Sep 27, 2017 | Books, Cover Designs

It’s been a while since I’ve gone behind the design of a book cover…and since someone asked me about it last week, I figure it’s time for another example. But what cover should I feature?? Always a question–and since I can’t always release a cover publicly when I design it (gotta wait for the author to do so, after all), I’m not always sure when I can feature a cover.

But in this case, there’s no question as (a) it’s a WhiteFire book and (b) it releases October 15! So today we’re going to take a look at Melody Carlson’s String of Pearls, the third book in the Mulligan Sisters Series.

Let’s start by looking at the first two books in the series.

As you can see, we have a theme established for the series. In the foreground we have one of the sisters–starting with Bridget, who joins the Army Nursing Service at the beginning of WWII, and then moving to Colleen in book 2, whose dreams get all tangled up in heartache as she pursues a Hollywood career. In the background of each book, I used a public domain era photograph which I colorized.

On book 3, we knew we wanted Molly, the youngest of the 4 Mulligan sisters. Molly looks a lot like Colleen, so my first challenge was going to be finding a model who could look like the sister of #2. I tried a few different girls but ended up using this one.

Of course, the body wasn’t right–but I liked the face. She bears a nice resemblance to the model for Colleen, coloring’s right, and I loved her smile. And I had already scoped out an image of a 40s style woman with a camera–and Molly loved photography.

I started by just putting the blond’s head as-is on the brunette’s body, but Melody requested some more 40s style hair. So I took this lovely lady’s curls…

Lightened and brightened them, put them on the first blonde’s head, and plunked them both on the brunette’s body, to get this.

But I didn’t want to keep the same coloring on the clothes–especially since I’d recently used another shot of the brunette in a different cover and preserved that red sweater in that one. Here, I decided to go with blue. So I copied the sweater and the skirt, made them new layers, and used the Hue/Saturation option to change them to blue.

But what to use as a backdrop? I tried a few modern photographs behind her–shots of San Francisco streets. But modern photographs just don’t look the same as 1940s photographs, and it gave the cover a whole different feel from the first two books. So I went hunting for photos I could use from the 1940s and eventually found this one.

The only problem with this is that it was going the wrong direction–I needed my lines pointing at my model, not away from her, in order to balance the image correctly. Now, flipping an image is easy-peasy…until you realize that there are signs which are then backwards. *Sigh*. But I just flipped and resized all of those as well.

Then the tricky part–colorizing it. This isn’t my forte, but I’ve been learning how to do it. In general, the method is to create a new layer, set said new layer to a different blending mode–often Overlay, though occasionally a different option works better, just depending on the color being used.

Now, I didn’t bother colorizing the whole photo, just the part visible behind Molly. So it looks a little funny like this, LOL.

I referred to the modern photos of this street to get some color inspiration for the houses, and chose red for the car because it would show up nicely against the dark tones of the black and white photo, and also provide a little pop of color.

Of course, we needed a beautiful sky. Each of the first two books had very bold, rich skies. So I searched for a photo of San Francisco with a gorgeous sunset sky and found this one.

So putting that behind the blank sky of the city, and it all behind Molly, we arrive at our basic design.

The title and series were already designed, so it was a pretty simple matter of plugging those in and adding some shading behind them to make everything stand out. I chose red for the title, echoing that pop of it from the car and the sign. My final step was to add a photo filter action to draw it all together and add a bit more depth to the colors. In this one, I used X-Pro (a filter Instagramers will recognize.) And there we have the finished cover!

So what do you think? Do you like the style that mixes old photos with new? Do you have a favorite from the series?

And if you’re a Melody Carlson fan, definitely go snatch these up! They’re a really interesting look at WWII through a family on the home front.