Live for Today & Danielle and the Wolf

COMING SOON TO TOTAL-E-BOUND!!!

Live for Today by Carol Lynne is the 12th and final book of the Campus Cravings Series. This book revisits the original two characters from Book 1 - Coach.

The artist request form mentioned a forest cabin and the original two characters. Unfortunately there were limited stock images of the original two characters and they weren't that appealing. So I decided to go with the 'lop their heads off' approach with a couple of brawny and nicely stacked guys.

As for the cabin in the woods. Well it turned out to be a timber Mansion in the woods LOL. Very different from the original image I sent over. Think 1950's hunting shack LOL!

Either way. I'm happy with the result and am kinda sad to see the last of this series.

Thanks for trusting me enough to do all 12 of these covers, Carol!


Danielle and the Wolf by Wendy Stone.

I really enjoyed doing this cover. There's always something 'liberating' about doing a fantasy cover. I guess it's a genre that I am passionate about and where I feel most comfortable using textures.

The castle in the background was the image I wanted to work with as the storyline had a white castle that loomed over the village. There was mention of forests and wolves and of course our ever gorgeous Hero.

The black wolf was easy enough to find. I upped the contrast and lowered the brightness of the image to make him appear darker. I've recently realised that the Brightness/Contrast function is an extremely useful tool. I will find myself using it in almost every cover I do these days.

I played around with a few different Hero's and we finally settled on this one. Then I just had to fit the wolf's head in so that it wasn't obscured by the Title and was able to be seen against the dark background.

I used a stock image of alpine forest tree tops as the texture which I used over the castle image. You can see a hint of them in the dark bottom corner if you look close enough.

Miranda & the Prince

Coming soon to Total-E-Bound: Miranda and the Prince by Wendy Stone.

Isn't she pretty *sigh*. Something a little bit different this time. I must say, it was a nice sidestep away from the man-titties and perky breasts LOL! I wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen standing in the check-out line at Big W with this one, is all I'm saying ;)

Okay. So where do I start. The girl was pretty straight forward except for her shawl. It had little silver spangles on it which didn't suit the theme of the 'Pauper' girl so I overlayed it with a tartan texture which gave it a more earthy, hand woven feel. The background is the beautiful Lake Bled in Slovenia. My husband's best mate married a Slovenian girl and he had the pleasure of going over there to the wedding to be best man. I stayed at home and looked after our baby daughter. He owes me big time.

But I digress. The ring was possibly the most fiddly part of the cover. The original ring was a yellow topaz so I tracked down a nice image of amber and cut out a chunk and stuck it over the top. A bit of blending and touching up and I think it came out pretty well ;)

All together there were four stock images used in this cover. There was a bit of trial and error with the font and font colours but other than that this was a relatively easy cover to do. There was talk about having the prince in the background but I'm glad we went with this one.

The plans are coming along for our Melbourne trip. Oh, and my camera died yesterday. Damn! Now I'll need to get myself another one to take down to Melbourne with me. I'm not going to miss that photo opportunity LOL! I had wanted to save up for a really good camera but I may just have to go for another 'aim and shoot' for the time being.

Um. I burned the back of my finger the other day. Got a lovely two inch blister running down the back of it. Funny the stupid things you do, isn't it? Who in their right mind would test a pot on the stove with the back of their finger? I do it all the time though. I flick the back of the steamer pot with my finger to see if it's on (only because I can't see the contents). Usually it just feels hot and I know things have started. But this time my damn finger stuck to the pot! Eeeeouuuch! Turns out that I'd had a blond moment and forgotten to put water in the pot so I burned myself with steel that was on the verge of meltdown.

Anyway, I think I've learned my lesson ;) The blister finally popped yesterday. Ick! I'm not quite sure what to do with it now. I'm just keeping it covered so I don't have to think about it LOL.

I'm so hard on my hands. I stubbed my middle finger on my right hand the week before so now it swollen and I can't bend it very well. Add that to the 2 inch burn AND the nice scar from the Vanity incident and there goes any visions of being a hand model *snort*.