Decoratin’ and Stuff

As y’all know, I do book cover design. And not just for myself. I’ve got backorders for paid book cover design for other folks. 

Which can get to be an expensive hobby if you allow it to go that far. Or can bring you in a pretty penny if you manage it right.

I mentioned before the cost of stock photos – which range in price from a couple of bucks up to a few hundred dollars, depending on licensing and other details. For stock photos – which is the source most book cover designers use, the prices include up to 250K book printings. After that – or when using for any other purpose (tee shirts, bookmarks, etc.)  – you have to buy an extended license to use the photos. If you hire an illustrator to do custom artwork, figure at LEAST $1000, just for the original artwork, and possibly more.

You can see why I take and/or create my own pictures whenever possible.

Part of that entails buying tools and add-ons for Photoshop. And yes, I have a real, licensed version of Photoshop. It costs me around $11 a month, which I make back without breaking a sweat. Today I dropped $20 on custom fonts and some add-ons, like a package for creating nautical maps. A couple of days ago I added a tool to turn 2D items into 3D icons, which is I foresee using in a few ways . While I’ll probably use it predominantly for icons, I can also see employing it in other areas. For example, I created this set of gears. This shows the before and after:

I didn’t keep the flat standalone gears, so you get to see the originals on a failed-book-cover mockup. I’ll almost certainly use the 3D gear assembly for something else, though.

As you can see, the first set of gears isn’t terrible. I added some texture and color effects to “age” them. It probably took me a couple of hours to hand-create and customize all those gears. It took one click to create the more dynamic 3D effect. (Well, it took a few minutes for the program to process it, but otherwise? One click.) The program add-on tool cost me $11. For a designer, it’s comparable to a mechanic buying a set of wrenches. It’s tools of the trade.

You can get a bazillion fonts for free for personal use, but once they’ll be used for any commercial option, the best ones aren’t free – and you’re often looking for something more unique than what you find on free sites, anyway. Now here’s the kicker. I can create my own fonts, too. I won’t rule out the possibility of doing so sometime in the future, but for now I don’t want to either take the time to learn the font-creation program OR take the time to create a new font. It would take me several days to create a custom font, because you not only have to create each individual letter and character, but you also need to adjust kerning (spacing) rules, etc. Nope, not unless and until I’m retired rich and can putter around with it.

Figuring out the right font (text style, in case you’re wondering) for a book cover is an art unto itself. I’m not overly thrilled with the one I’m using for my Atlantis action/adventure/romance opus, and figuring out one for the fantasy book added a lot of gray hairs for me. I ended up going with something more elegant than what I had before, in no small part because the cover from Book Two has a different character to it and I wanted something to tie them together:

I know the people who follow me on Facebook have already seen this stuff, ad naseam. But some people (**coughDANGERSPOUSEcough**) don’t visit Facebook so they get it here. Plus I’m still tweaking and things change. Hopefully with the “dragon skin” background it all looks nice and fantasy-ish. The style is consistent between the books – ahem, series – despite the imagery and coloring differences.

I’m still looking for a tool I can use to cleanly cut something out of a busy photo background. So far I haven’t found it. But there are a lot of other goodies out there and I’m buying them up, piece by piece.

They may have to wait a bit, though, because after work today I get to deal with a dead battery (under warranty). I have roadside assistance and all kinds of coverage, just need to see if they’ll actually bring me a battery or if I’ll have to drive across the planet to the Kia dealership to get it replaced.

The fun part is we’re getting rain. Lots of rain. Lots and LOTS of rain. People on the freeway will be driving like idiots, so I’m calling and making them come to me if it’s an option.