My Book Covers - Fair Maiden

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Now a bit about the cover for Fair Maiden. Once again I created this entire cover in Adobe Photoshop. I also took many of the pictures. The model is a young women my daughter knows and a friend of the family.

For the dress I bought the material a year ago hoping to use it for this the cover. I found a pattern I liked and sewed the top together. It's decorator fabric and is extremely thick. The back, sleeves and sides of the dress have rivets and it laces all up together. After pounding in over 80 rivets I think I may never do that again. Well, at least not with thick fabric like that. It's kind of too bad you can't see them in the photo, especially with how much work they were!


The bottom of the dress is just an extra piece of material draped across the model to look like a skirt. She was wearing jeans under it. The material is so heavy it wouldn't really make a very good dress.

HER HAIR!!! - The model has beautiful hair but not quite long enough for what I had in mind, or quite blond enough. A large portion of her long locks have been added just for the picture. All of that was done in Photoshop. It took quite a while to get it looking just right. Her hair alone probably consists of about 9-10 layers in Photoshop.


The wall behind the bed, the castle out through the window are all stock photos or images I obtained the rights to. Again, brushes were used from Brusheezy and the most prominent one is from Lileya.deviantart.com She really has some great stuff!

This cover took quite a while to design and it's made up if over 80 layers in Photoshop!


It should be noted that wedding dresses in medieval times were not white but looked very similar to this style. The only thing not quite right is that her sleeves would have been long and they are described that way in the book. However, it wouldn't look balanced graphically if I had done them long for the cover. The rebellious side of me made them quarter-length for artistic reasons. ;)