Books are a passion of mine and long before I ever entered college I loved designing book covers even if my designs were nothing special.  I had to include the Tsavo book jacket.  This jacket, designed in Illustrator, is composed of a heavily manipulated fire stock image spanning the entire bottom portion.  It also features a ghost-like silhouette of a lion prowling through the blaze. Making the fiery grass along the bottom extend all the way to both ends was no easy task.  My original stock image was only about a third of the length of the jacket.  To get a seamless and continuous panorama using the same image, I had to get creative about duplicating and merging layers, using the clone stamp tool, healing brush, and color adjustments in Photoshop.  Now it is very difficult to tell that is all the same image!

 

The design is dark and austere to harbinger the mood of the story within.  Tsavo is a made-up historical fiction book about true events regarding two man-eater lions in Tsavo, Kenya in the 1800s.  I was inspired to create this book jacket after watching the film The Ghost and the Darkness which is about the same events.  The inspiration for the look of my book cover was a scene involving a lion snarling at the camera amidst roaring flames. 

Grasslands stock complements of Lisa Bagherpour

Masai Man photo complements of Nicola