Random: old mock covers

I did these working covers a few years ago, which were never published, and I thought it’d be fun to put these up (I no longer have the PSDs of some mock covers, which is why they are in irregular sizes).

The one that took me the longest is, believe it or not, Pyromaniacs in Love because it took a lot of digital manipulation and a few photos (and an unwilling pair of friends) to get the exact effect I wanted.

And the easiest are, obviously, the Black series and those images used were never meant for publication because all images in this series were nicked taken from magazine adverts and photo spreads. Those mock covers were supposed to help us to visualise how the Black series would appear.

My favourite is… probably A Geek in Love because it’s hilarious. If I could turn the clock back, I would change the colours of the title. It’s too dark. My least favourite would be The Rogue. Hate the font and its colour, and the layout. I would re-do it completely if I had the chance.

I have a soft spot for Ghost Magic (a poor font choice, though) because I had fun creating the image. I wish I still had the original photo (a dancing woman striking a pose with her hands up) because we could see how it evolved into what we see here. It took me a while to figure out how to combine a scan of a painting on an actual glass pane; a blank tracing paper (to create a blur effect), and two scanned photos through Photoshop to make it ghostly. I was too new to Photoshop to realise that the program already had those effects (which I didn’t know until well after the Ghost Magic cover was completed). It would have saved me time if I had known, but it was still emotionally rewarding when I felt I achieved the effect I wanted.

A Murder of Crows was my very first cover. It’s so flawed, but at least I had fun trying. I think it’s a combo of a hand-drawn face, traced from a photo of a friend’s face, and a photo of only three flying crows, which was digitally manipulated into a number of crows in different sizes and positions. The face had a high forehead, which didn’t work, so I faked the fringe, which didn’t work well either. Yeah, nice idea, but could do a lot better.

The Codex was about an Irish woman during WWII, if I remember right, and I chose that image for that very reason as it screamed Irish. Stereotypical, but it was the reason why I chose the image.