Single White Knight

COMING SOON TO TOTAL-E-BOUND!!!!!

Single White Knight is an erotic Time Travel written by the talented Brynn Paulin.

This cover was challenging in the fact that I needed to bring together a medieval knight and a modern day guy.

Originally to keep a sense of history I had a castle in the background but we felt we needed a more modern background.

There were two versions of this knight that I was playing around with, the front view that I ended up using and a side view. There was some juggling involved because the front guy was difficult to work around, with his arm up like that. But I think I've managed to get it all in without it looking too cluttered. The original knight images were actually black and white so I had to change it to look like it was colour.

A simple mask and hue change were all I needed there. Luckily there were not too many colours involved. Just the armor and the skin. The guy in the front was a simple cut and paste although his 'angles' were awkward to work around.

I made the font follow the line of the guy's body. Whether that is graphically correct, I don't know, but it seemed to look better to me LOL!

You may notice some textures hidden in there somewhere. I found a nice sketched medieval battle scene and thought that would add some interest to it. It's hard to see on the cover but on the cover flat which incorporates the back it looks quite good.

I've been playing around, creating my own textures lately. I take my own photos and then just play around in Photoshop with them. Adding textures can really make an image 'pop' and it's fun seeing what you can do with them.

I've also been invited to write a monthly blog over at TEB's Hot Spot! This month's post is a breakdown on the Men of Tokyo: Sudden Surrender.

Theron's Return

COMING SOON TO TOTAL-E-BOUND!!!

Theron's Return by Carol Lynne is Book 11 in the Campus Cravings series.

The covers in this series, as I have noted before, are all very much the same. Just a change of images.

A bit of cutting and pasting, juggling of images, etc. The hardest part is searching for the right images.

This one had a Psychiatrist in it, from memory. Hence the leather sofa at the top. With the top image I usually try to give some hint of the storyline. While the bottom image centers on the Characters.

I used a total of four stock images in this cover.

Send Me An Angel!!

COMING SOON TO TOTAL-E-BOUND!!!!

Send Me An Angel by Alysha Ellis.

Yum-o! LOL!

A nice straight forward cover with minimal stock. It's quite striking but that could just be the blue/white theme. Oh and the God-like model on the front! Ha ha ..

Anyway, it was pretty simple, despite being the second version. Just for something a little different I'll attach a copy of my initial idea. As you can see the theme is quite similar

So only three pieces of stock in this cover. Background, man and wings.

The wings were just a cut and past with a bit of softening and 'Fluffing' around the edges with the smudge tool.

The original model had a necklace on which I had to paint out. I'm not 100% happy with it, because I can still see where I painted. Of course others possibly wouldn't notice .. but now that I've brought your attention to it .... LOL!

Oh and Alysha I hope that drool didn't effect your keyboard! LOL! I'm glad you liked it though :D

Sorry things have been a bit slow on here lately. I've been a bit distracted by real-life LOL. There are a couple of covers in the pipeline and my next batch will hopefully be sent through to me any day now. So more covers to come soon. Thanks for being patient with me :D

Duet in Blood

COMING SOON TO TOTAL-E-BOUND!!!

Duet in Blood by J.P. Bowie is the 3rd book in a Vampire series.

The previous two covers were done by another cover artist with TEB so all I really had to do was find the images. The set-up was the same for all three covers.

I've been wanting to use the dark guy in the background for ages. He's got a real dark, broody look to him. I wish there was more stock like this for the darker genres.

So a very easy cover yet relatively effective. Nice shot of Paris down the bottom :D

I've been finding it soooo hard these last few days to come back down to earth after my little trip to Melbourne. It's reminded me that there's another world outside of my little computer desk. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing in all honesty. I'll have to wait and see if this itch subsides.

Now, I must get back to my covers before I get sacked!! LOL

I'm Back!!!

Hellooooo ... here I am :D *Waves to Dakota and Amarinda*

Been busy with covers and just waiting for new ones to be released before I put them up here. So it has been a while :D I've also been getting up to mischief. Took a few days off to head down to Sydney and Melbourne.

Caught up with Family in Sydney and then left the kids with Mum and hoofed it off to Melbourne to see the So You Think You Can Dance Australia Tour. What an AWESOME weekend. The girls I met up with were fantastic and I have a feeling we'll be friends for many years to come. We're already talking about catching up on an annual basis. Next year we're talking of going to a Spa to get pampered for a weekend. Can't wait!

Now. As for the SYTYCD tour. W.O.W! The show was fantastic. We screamed and generally upset those people around us. But I paid for my tickets too, so I was going to enjoy myself LOL! We generally acted like Groupies and screamed the house down when ever Jemma and Rhys came on stage LOL. We were there with Jemma's mum which was pretty spesh - what an amazing lady. She then surprised us with backstage passes so we got to go back and meet all the dancers.

I finally met Rhys and Jemma. My two favourite dancers. Got pics with all the dancers - even Jack, who won the series. They were all so nice and accommodating. I'm not sure if I'll be as emotionally attached to the next series. For some reason these two dancers really got under my skin. Can't wait to see where their careers take them now.











Here we are with Rhys (I'm the blonde next to Rhys) and then there's the not so good one with me and Jemma, LOL! I'm hoping one of the others got a better pic :D




So I've met some fantastic people over the last week. It was nice to step outside the 'Mummy' box. I'm thinking I might have to do it a bit more often LOL. Well, I'm back to the real world now. Got some more covers to work on so I better get to it.

Red Stone of Passion

Coming soon to Total-E-Bound ...

Red Stone of Passion by Tuesday Morrigan.

I've had a sudden rush of covers released. Can you tell? LOL.

Red Stone of Passion is a Menage book, obviously as there are two bodies and a head on the cover.

I just had to lighten the woman's skin tone to a 'coffee colour' and give her a bob hairstyle. She also had orangy-gold lipstick which clashed with the red diamond so I just changed the hue to something more suitable.

The guy's were straight forward cut and paste. There was a bit of jostling for position but they fit in quite well. It's funny how something as simple as a belly-button can cause me to re-work a cover. Originally the middle guy's belly-button was framed by the 'd', making it stand out too much for my liking .Of course now that I've mentioned it, everyone will be looking at it. It's still a bit prominent, isn't it. It looks like a bullet hole.
Oh, hey AJ! Does the fellow in the jeans look a little familiar LOL!

The diamond was a simple colour change from blue. I like the vibrancy of the red. I also played around with a few different fonts for this one. For the title itself I've used three different fonts.

Now for something a little different. Jacquelyn Frank is holding a raffle were you get the chance to win some truly mouth-watering prizes and all for a good cause! So if you're a pet lover, head on over and see if anything takes your fancy. Best thing is she's happy to post WORLD WIDE! Godiva Chocolates, ladies ... an advanced copy of NOAH, the final book in her Nightwalker Series, AND a load of fantastic reads from some carefully selected authors. So get on over there and have a squiz, buy a ticket and support the Animal Compassion Network!

Men of Tokyo - Sudden Surrender

Coming soon to Total-E-Bound!

Men of Tokyo - Sudden Surrender by Sedonia Guillone is book 3 in the WhiteTigers series.

This is the first cover I have done of this series and damn if it wasn't a tricky one LOL! I honestly thought that body tattoo was going to be the end of me as a cover artist. Seriously!

Anyway, because I'm pretty chuffed with how it turned out, I thought I'd share with you how I managed to pull it together.

First things first. I needed to find the characters. In all honesty there's not a lot of Asian/Oriental guys available out there. Well. I don't think chubby business man is quite in the 'Erotic Cover' league, but someone might yet surprise me.

Anyway, so I managed to find some nice bods. The guy on the left worked perfectly for the Character he was to portray. The Guy in the middle though, looked like he'd sucked on a lemon so I decided to lop off his head and give him a new one. Oh, if only it were so easy in real life, eh?

The original head I chose was a bit too 'cranky' so we went for the guy on the right. Sweet!

Okay, so now with lots of cutting and pasting of heads we have our two characters ready to go. Now for the hard bit.

The character over on the right called for a full body Yakuza tattoo - white tigers and cherry blossoms. O.M.G.!

Now I'm pretty adept these days at adding a tattoo here and there and getting them to look relatively natural. BUT a whole body tattoo??

So the search began. Firstly I trawled through the stock sites. There were a few things I could have thrown together but in all honesty the amount of stock required would have killed me. However, in my searches I managed to stumble across this image on the right.

It had the tiger AND the blossoms. Bingo!

Unfortunately the tiger was yellow, but thanks to the desaturate tool I was able to leach out the colour and produce a white tiger. Next, it was obvious that this image was not going to fit on the big guy's body without looking a bit odd. Plus the larger I stretched the image, the poorer the quality became. So I was going to have to keep my images small.

What I ended up doing was creating a new document and copying and pasting parts of the image around the tiger, gradually expanding outwards. I'd blend the edges of the image so there was no obvious seam by erasing with a large, soft brush.

This gave me a broader canvas to work with. Also ensuring that I would not notice the edges of the cut & pastes in amongst all that busy background.

So back to the big guy. Using the expanded tattoo design, I enlarged it enough to cover his chest. I had to dabble with the perspective so that the angles were correct. Then using a displacement map of his torso, I was able to distort the tattoo so it fit to his chest. I worked like this in sections all over his torso, upper & lower arms and shoulders. Cutting and pasting, blending and merging sections of the basic design until I was happy that his body was covered.

As you can imagine there were quite a few layers. At least 20 just to cover his torso, arms and shoulders. Once I had him covered I copied those layers and then merged them into one. I changed the layer to Multiply and fiddled with the opacity until it looked more natural. Phew!

My next challenge, but obviously not so difficult was to try to find an image of the Kanji for Suzuki. I did manage to find one but it was of poor quality. So I had to recreate it in a new document. I hope to god it is correct LOL! This was just a 'normal' tattoo that needed to go on the background guy.

The hard bit out of the way all I needed to do now was bring the design over from the previous ones of the series. Pop the the guy's together, blend them in, fiddle with contrasts, shadows, highlights, etc and then go and find myself a nice quite corner to huddle in. LOL!

Of course there was a lot more fiddling involved, but I don't want to bore you all with the details. This is just to give people the gist of what goes on behind the scenes.