Uly Quits His Job
For my own debut novel released in 2022 by Siretona Creative, I chose to work with experienced illustrator, Gary Horsman. I asked him to draw all the parts on separate layers so I could move them around in Photoshop.
He drew the silhouetted landscape and character walking on the road. I struggled with finding the perfect typeface for the title. Fortunately, he also drafted a version of the title in his own hand lettering that I thought fit the tone and mood of the book. Gary completed his work in Procreate for iPad Pro.
Then I completed the design on my 2017 iPad Pro 12.9 inch using Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer and exported assets for printing. The front, back, and spine were assembled by the publisher in Adobe InDesign.
Gary Horsman's original illustration for the cover on the left below included Uly walking, the landscape, and his lettering.
I modified his lettering, scaled the image of Uly down, and added multiple layers of color and texture to the landscape. His drawing was fairly wide so that it would wrap over the spine to the back cover and dust cover flaps. I extended it a little for some social media banner images.
For the background on the cover, I knew I wanted some storm clouds to be threatening on an otherwise clear sky. I took a number of photos over several weeks in an attempt to get one that I could use.
Ultimately, I erased the blue sky from a photo I chose that has the clouds I like. Then I created a square with a gradient from navy blue to baby blue sampled from a different photo I had taken of a clear sky.
This is the entire hard cover dust jacket for the first proof of the book. I designed the map so readers can follow the journey of the main character. To fill in the back, the final version includes an endorsement from my friend and fellow author Nicola MacCameron.
