Trial Cover

by wjw on March 20, 2013

Here’s my first attempt at a cover for To Glory Arise, originally published as The Privateer.

I’m particularly proud of the way in which I smooshed the two ships together to produce a more dramatic composition.

Your comments are solicited.

Zora March 20, 2013 at 6:00 am: Um, the wind filling the sails isn’t EXACTLY the same f0r both ships. Very very close, but not exact. Also, the ship that seems to be behind is taller, which seems wrong, even though it is of course possible.

The juxtaposition of the two ships, while very skillfully done, produces somewhat of an uncanny valley effect for me. But perhaps I’m an outlier.
wjw March 20, 2013 at 6:33 am: I didn’t alter the ships’ heights, so that’s straight from the original painting. All I did was remove some of the pixels between the ships so there wasn’t so much space between them.

If there’s an uncanny valley, it’s one created by the original artist, not by me.
Kathy March 20, 2013 at 8:28 am: I like it! Somehow, I want a font that looks more “Early American” but that’s a minor quibble.
Kristin March 20, 2013 at 1:30 pm: I’m not particularly keen on the color of the title font or the font style itself. In my humble opinion, it is rather jarring and at odds with the rest of the cover. Your name is in blue, the print is predominantly blue and then there is this jarring lime green bold font title. Perhaps if the title was in a similar font to your name the lime green would work?

I do like the ships though.
wjw March 20, 2013 at 9:09 pm: Interesting. I hadn’t noticed this till Kristin mentioned the “lime-green” title font, but when I created that in Photoshop, it was a brilliant gold color. When translated to JPEG and viewed on a browser, that gold shade turned green.

I’ll have to investigate further and see what I can do.
Shash March 21, 2013 at 1:25 am: Gold is really difficult to reproduce accurately. Good luck, because I think gold would look good.
Two things attracted my attention right away: the blue coloring, which has a positive connotation attached to it (I expect a bright, uplifting story from a bright cover), and the closeness and angle of the ships to each other. Either they are buddies or they are in a close race.
FWIW, if I were a new WJW reader, the bright colors and closeness of the ships might make me think they are buddies. It is not easy to detect the cannon fire and ship damage at a quick glance.
I really like this but I do suggest darkening it up a bit because (sigh) the buyer often wants some foreshadowing and dark=conflict is what the publishers have trained us to expect.
Brian Renninger March 21, 2013 at 7:18 pm: On my monitor the font color looks just plain yellow rather than gold or lime-green. The color variation is probably due to variation of color between monitors and the fact that few installations of Windows have calibrated the monitor color display.

You might try some of these for web-safe colors.

http://cloford.com/resources/colours/websafe1.htm

http://cs.brown.edu/cgi-bin/colorcomb

–Brian R.