Book Cover Express averages about 70 inquiries a week. Quite often the people who contact us are not sure what they want. They know they want a book cover, but beyond that they don't know if they want a graphic designer, an illustrator, a photographer or a painter. I'm sure there are artists out there who can do it all, but I focus mostly on graphic design. By definition this means I might take a photo for a book cover, or I might create a simple piece of vector artwork in Adobe Illustrator. Most often it means creating an abstract background and making the text the focal point, or it means manipulating images so they work on the cover.
On more than one occasion I've had someone say, "oh, you JUST work with stock images." Well, no...no I don't, but in defense of designers everywhere there's very little "just" about working with stock images.
Even a cover with one image will require a lot of work...in fact, just finding the right image can take days of searching, reading licenses and testing different images using watermarked "comped" versions.
Sometimes you need to combine several images, which is the case in a project I just completed. It took five images (four I licensed from Canstock.com and one I took myself) to make the cover. For three of the images, I had to completely remove the background, which meant blowing the image up really large and carefully going around the entire thing, catching and smoothing every pixel to lift out the portion I wanted. Then I had to repeat the process to blend the images into the background and do layer upon layer of shading and lighting to make them all seem like they're part of one picture.
Here's the project I'm talking about. The images I used are below I'm not sure I'm going to keep the text in that font or color.



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