{"id":867,"date":"2010-05-07T17:54:39","date_gmt":"2010-05-08T01:54:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/?p=867"},"modified":"2010-05-07T18:10:37","modified_gmt":"2010-05-08T02:10:37","slug":"the-road-not-taken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/?p=867","title":{"rendered":"The Road Not Taken"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, I worked on a cover that I normally would have assigned to someone else, but that someone else already had plenty on her plate, and I wanted to do something a little different from my usual fare and take a break from my illustration work. So I took on Amanda Steiger’s urban fantasy, Unclaimed<\/em>, where the author requests something like The Scent of Shadows<\/a>\u2014except the heroine should have short black hair.<\/p>\n

I had a hard time finding the stock photos I wanted, at first. Then I resigned myself to doing a little more work than I usually do and do some head swapping so that I could make do with what stock photos I could<\/em> find. So I purchased these photos:<\/p>\n

\"the<\/p>\n

and whipped this up:<\/p>\n

\"draft<\/p>\n

I thought I’d done a pretty good job when I sent it off, despite the slight differences in light sources and obvious paint jobs, especially considering how quickly I managed to put the elements together once I found them. But when I got the author’s feedback, my shoulders slumped, and I wanted to close my laptop and call it a day. For the most part, she loved it, but she wanted to know if I could lighten the woman’s lips and add some kind of dark leather jacket. The first, I could do very easily, but the second…<\/p>\n

I guess I didn’t read her e-mail all that closely because it looked to me like she wanted me to put the model in a leather jacket. This is like, but not quite as bad as, presenting a photo of someone from the front, where then people ask you to flip it over so you can see a photo of that same someone from the back. If your thought is, “But wait a minute … how?”\u2014yes, that was my thought, too.<\/p>\n

Normally, I would have fixed the lips and then reasonably explained to the author that I would have to swap the model out entirely and possibly lose the pose and everything nice about the cover to find another model that wore a leather jacket. I would have said, “Yeah, that’s not so easy, and this is an e-book cover for a small independent publisher, not a high-paying cover at, say, Penguin,” and left it at that.<\/p>\n

\"leatherBut my plate is near empty\u2014I haven’t had a bunch of new cover assignments in a while, and I’ve finally caught up with most of my work, finally getting down to my more time-intensive illustration projects\u2014so I said, “Whatever. Let’s give it a go.” And I searched for leather jackets.<\/p>\n

I especially tried finding something in the same relative pose, something with one bent arm and one straightened arm, something I could coerce onto the model I used for the cover, and this, on the right, was the best I could do.<\/p>\n

And then I pieced that jacket bit by bit, painting the seams together, until somehow I managed to do as the author asked and added that leather jacket.<\/p>\n

Thank goodness the author loved the second draft. It made taking the road I don’t normally take really worth it.<\/p>\n

\"final<\/p>\nShare this post:

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Today, I worked on a cover that I normally would have assigned to someone else, but that someone else already had plenty on her plate, and I wanted to do something a little different from my usual fare and take a break from my illustration work. So I took on Amanda Steiger’s urban fantasy, Unclaimed, where the author requests something like The Scent of Shadows\u2014except the heroine should have short black hair. I had a hard time finding the stock…<\/p>\n

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