Recently, I’ve been seeing many fun animations added to book covers. The designer in me starts examining those images to figure out how to recreate them. It’s mostly, in Photoshop, layering videos, images and text. Seeing those animated book covers got me thinking, what if instead of making regular image Read more…
Chris Mentzer asked “Where can I find a mapmaker program to make designing Fantasy worlds easier?” … I use Photoshop but that program is not easy to understand, which can be a bit frustrating. Let’s look at other map making software. Most of these aren’t free. This list is by no means Read more…
Special Announcements! Shutterstock accepted two of my photos!! Still, still blown away. They also rejected some saying the shots are poorly lit, out of focus, or not composed properly. This started me on a new adventure–researching photography tips and Photoshop fixes. Ideally, I want to take a class, but I Read more…
Have a safe and Merry Christmas!!!
I’m that person that’ll walk through a cemetery with my camera hoping to find some extra creepy shots to inspire a horror or dark story. I’ll be scaring myself imagining all types of abominations jumping out at me as I raise my camera. Or worse, imagining some figure appearing in Read more…
You never really know what you enjoy until you try it. It never occurred to me I’d like graphic design until I decided to design my own book covers. Even better, people actually like my artwork. Now, I’m selling premade book covers that I designed. For fellow authors/designers out there, Read more…
It’s time for another look behind the cover. My first non-fiction book Building Dark Worlds: A World Building Guide will be released in October. The cover presented a new challenged. I knew I wanted to use this image. I’m gathering my posts about #worldbuilding to turn them into an ebook #amwriting #darkfantasy http://t.co/K8TusX1NEu Read more…
You probably thought I’d review Jurassic World today. My parents came in for the weekend so we didn’t see it. I will be seeing it this weekend! In the post Photoshop Project: Map Making, I showed you the fantasy map I was designing. To recap, I usually make fairly flat Read more…
I’m taking a Photoshop class at NYU. Since I taught myself Photoshop, there’s a lot of tools I don’t use because I don’t know what they do. I also wanted to learn why certain tools cause a certain effect. Photoshop has a keyboard shortcut for almost every function. I’ve always Read more…
People will judge a book by its cover, and it’s interior. I touched on this in the post What Does Your Cover Say? How do you escape the DIY look most self-published books have. Well, you can hire a professional cover designer. For some, that’s not realistic. I don’t have the Read more…
