Fourth paperback book cover

Good News Everyone (as Professor Farnsworth of Futurama would say).
I now have four cover designs in print.
"The Women of the English Civil War" by Margaret Cooper Evans is now available in paperback.
Margaret was photographed over 3 hours in four different 17th Century guises, I then used Photoshop to combine the best images, scale, colour balance and add sunlight and shadows to the two images that were taken when the sky went out. The shadow is faked in Photoshop and the background is a photograph of a painting of the Great Fire of London that can be found in the Museum of London.

There are 40 images inside. Most are photographs taken by myself or the author. I then touched them up and made them print ready.

For those interested there are the three covers for Abbadon called
"Century of the Soldier" and "Monarchies of God" by Paul Kearney. I also created the elements for "Uprising: Heirs of the Demon King" by Sarah Cawkwell (though a designer at Abbadon put them together in a better arrangement than I did, so kudos to them!)

Just realised. I didn't blog about that cover, so here it is.

The crown is a computer graphic made in 3DS Max. The flag was originally created by Abbadon and given to me to make a high res version then I put it on a latice and used a cloth simulation and wind effector to get the ripples (that can barely be seen)

Halloween in Overdown: The fifth Hilary Long book cover

Halloween in Overdown (Part 1)

We took a range of photographs at Charlecote House a month before Easter. There was a range of brilliant squashes and pumpkins in the garden shop and it is one of those that makes the background.

There was quite a bit of re-touching and copying of pumpkin elements from some of the other photos.
On a separate image of a skull (cribbed off the internet) I drew over it to make an evil skull. This was then copied over the pumpkin and the blending mode changed so that it darkened and made it look like the pumpkin had been carved but not lit from the inside.

Since the character this represents smokes a cigar, the last element is a c.g. cigar and smoke effect done in 3DS Max with the smoke being comped from a photograph.