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The screenshot of my Amazon author page *breaks down* (Please ignore twitter feed that is basically a homage to Poldark) |
My mother did the drawings for both covers and I love them but something (A LOT) was majorly lacking. The main issue for both Mum and I was the painted orange and grey. In a nutshell, we used a dodgy paint and brush set from a seller on Amazon that totaled £3.00... with delivery - and I think it shows. Not only did the cheap watercolours ripple the paper, mother really had to battle to get some colour out of it THEN when she did, she faced the ridiculous nightmare of trying to make the brushstrokes (using the terrible brushes) even and smooth. I think for a while, I was in denial and I kept saying to myself Oh, they are lovely! but with a heavy heart.
The two books are part of a series and because of that, I wanted to have the theme of grey, orange and black and for it to LOOK like they are a set but they didn't. So on Sunday evening, as I had put myself on a self-imposed writing ban for the weekend, I finally braved looking at them again and knew I needed to do something about them STAT. At first, I was only messing about, seeing what I could do - just out of curiosity. I got up the good old reliable Paint program on my laptop and started playing around with the orange colour on the clown's hair ... and from there, I spent about a day on the covers and only finished a couple of hours ago.
Without further ado, here is the before (left) and after (right) for WEIGHTING TO LIVE:
As you can see, they are still very similar, but at the same time, SO VERY DIFFERENT. Instead of me rambling for paragraphs (which I could easily do), I'll just list what I changed:
- The first thing to bite the dust was the hilarious grey of the scales. I couldn't believe the difference.
- I had always been bothered by the cactus pot in the bottom right-hand corner - it was too high - so I brought it down and made it slightly larger to fill the space better.
- When I went over what mum had drawn with a black pen, I ruined the swan's face so sorted out my mistake as best I could, then I moved it slightly in.
- I filled in the tweezers the same colour as the scales.
- I took out the horizontal lines - the ripples I mentioned earlier caused by the cheap watercolours.
- There were a lot of pencil & paint marks that shouldn't have been there so I tidied them up.
- I enlarged the coconuts in the top left-hand corner and made them a little more central.
- I 'painted' Elizabeth the First's barnet, the swan's beak and the 2 separate candles a bright orange colour.
- I evened up, then thickened the black border.
I think that's all for this cover but it took HOURS, so I'm sure I tinkered with other stuff too that I've forgotten about.
Here is the before and after for CHANGES: A SHORT STORY COLLECTION:
It's pretty obvious what 'changed' here but I'll tell you anyway:
- I coloured in the clown's hair orange and made the semi-circles more even. I also sorted out his bloomin' wonky mouth.
- I coloured the end of the cigarette the same orange as the clown's hair and added tiny white dots, then put in the odd stroke of orange and black where the ash is.
- The marmalade cake took approximately 2 hours to complete. The trickiest bit was making sure the proportions were right so I shifted where the cake slice ended and coloured it all the same orange as everything else and moved the candle back a bit.
- I made a thicker black border for it.
I also want to mention that while I worked on both covers, I listened to everything Boublil and Schönberg ever wrote (and I mean literally) and I forgot how much I love their music. It blew me away as if I was hearing it all for the first time and if you have never heard the soundtrack for Martin Guerre, do it, because it's an underrated GEM of a musical!
There you have it! A long winded explanation. The end.
Until next time.
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