Mrs. PG’s Book Cover Step by Step

One of the comments to the introduction of Mrs. PG was a request that Passive Guy show a step-by-step process of making the cover for Mrs. PG’s latest book. With some trepidation because he knows some real graphic artists are regular visitors, here’s how it went.

First, you go to Amalfi, a lovely village on the Amalfi Coast, in the southwestern part of Italy. If you’ve ever seen a movie set in Italy where an aerial shot shows the hero and heroine riding in a red Ferrari convertible along a winding road with mountains on one side and cliffs dropping down to the sea on the other side, chances are, it’s somewhere along the Amalfi Coast.

The village of Amalfi is a small place and PG was wandering up a narrow side street when he saw a lovely doorway at the end of a narrow sidewalk and took the following photo and a few others:

PG won’t bore you with photography minutiae, but the human eye sees contrast between light and dark areas much better than cameras (digital or film) do. In this case, the lower parts of the photo were in deep shade while the upper parts were in full sun so the camera doesn’t do a very good job. The colors of the arch over the doorway look blah in the photo.

So PG did some Photoshop adjustment to make the photo look more like the original scene did to his eye and ended up with the following as one of his better travel pictures from Almafi:

The dark areas are lighter and the bright areas are not so blown out and the half-arch over the door shows its true colors.

The photograph didn’t make the cut for a print on the wall and sat on PG’s hard drive until Mrs. PG needed a cover for a book about Italy. The title, “The Only Way to Paradise,” put PG in mind of doorways and, surprisingly, he remembered this one. Mrs. PG approved the idea, so PG opened up Photoshop and started playing around.

Here was PG’s first crack at a cover:

PG did several things to turn the vacay photo into draft 1 of the cover:

1. Cropped the photo to get rid of most of the second story and the less interesting details along the left side.
2. Straightened out the vertical lines. If you look at the original photo, you’ll see the wall on the left seems to bow inward toward the top. This is an artifact of using a wide-angle lens.
3. Applied a paint-style texture to the photo to make it look a little exotic and more like a place of the imagination
4. Blurred the area behind the title so the background wouldn’t interfere with the words and dropped in a couple of sections of a gold picture frame PG had photographed somewhere.
5. Lightened up the door area and the walkway and increased the prominence of the blue in the pavement slightly

After examining printed proofs (PG formerly had a good color inkjet but got tired of the ink cartridges drying out between uses, so he proofs by getting 8×10 prints at Costco), PG decided the dark door didn’t look like it was the way to Paradise, so he made his own more paradisaical door:

The big changes for this one were:

1. PG’s home-made gold door

2. Playing with the title/author and darkening the background behind it

3. Moving the title/author down to get rid of extraneous second-floor windows and detail

4. Dropping a series name at the bottom

5. Zapping the bright sunlit area just below the lamp so it looked like the rest of the building

The gold door looked weird. PG put some appropriate shadows around the top, along the right side and bottom, dropped in a door knob and a door knocker, then took them out because the door still wasn’t quite right.

Then he had a brilliant idea:

What could be cooler on the doorway to paradise than a ghostly medieval lady?

Mrs. PG took a look at the proof and asked, “What’s that weird woman doing there?”

PG suggested maybe Mrs. PG should add a ghost to her book, but that didn’t fly.

Fortunately, PG remembered a cool door he photographed on the Greek island of Mykynos. Like the Amalfi Coast, Mykonos is a playground for the rich and famous. PG wasn’t that enamored with it (Santorini, on the other hand, seriously rocks), but Mykonos did have a great door. Here’s the travel pic:

So, the ghost lady and PG’s home-made door were, er, out the door and the Mykonos door was headed for the big time after:

1. PG realized he hit the bougainvillea button too many times for the travel photo and backed down the color intensity

2. He turned a rectangular door into an arched door by dropping it in behind an arched doorway

3. Door shadows needed more tweaking

4. Bougainvillea hanging across the door got zapped

5. It would not do for The Only Way to Paradise to be locked, so the padlock was removed

6. Painterly touches were added to the door to give it a feeling similar to the rest of the scene

7. Mrs. PG wanted a different font, so that happened. There’s a tiny drop shadow on the author’s name to make the new font stand out a bit more against the blurred background.

8. The background at the top of the page went all the way to black so the title would show clearly

9. The gold picture frames went the full width of the cover (and on the print version, stretch around the spine and across the back cover.

Here’s the final result:

PG does this sort of thing seldom enough so he always has to relearn stuff he knew at the end of the previous project. However, these activities use a different part of his brain (Livia could tell us which one) and PG finds that refreshing. The real temptation is to never stop tweaking and call something done, but some of us experience that problem in several areas of our professional lives.

Covers, Self-Publishing Covers