I wish I had more artistic abilities. I envy those who are able to draw. Whenever I play Pictionary, it’s all stick-men or stick-animals. What’s an art-disabled person to do when they need to create cover art? I’ve developed a simple, five step process to create covers for my fiction. Although the result isn’t going to wow anybody with it’s creativity, it does look passably professional.

Step 1 – Know what sizes you want

For an upcoming short story, “In the Closet”, I wanted two graphics: one 300×300 and the other a smaller thumbnail 48×48.

(Update Jan 2011 – I realize that the best size for a cover graphic is 800×1200. This size works great for both Amazon.com and B&N)

Step 2 – Find a royalty-free picture

You don’t want to just grab any old picture you find on the internet or you’ll open yourself up for all sorts of legal troubles.

I go to iStockPhoto and look for cheap images (a credit or two, which basically means a buck or two).

I searched for “messy clothes closet” and found a suitable image right off the bat. The smallest size was 400×300. The image above is the one I selected.

Step 3 – Photoshop

First of all I crop or expand the canvas size to the desired dimensions. 300×300 in this case.

After cropping it, I browse through the Photoshop filters and apply one or more to tweak the image. Since the story has sort of a fuzzy, dreamy quality I used the Distort | Twirl filter and the Distort | Diffuse glow to come up with the following:

Step 4 – Fonts and Title

The story, “In the Closet”, is kind of a mild-horror type story. So I wanted to use a font that gave that impression. Since none were installed on my computer that felt “right” to me, I headed over to DaFont.com and downloaded the Nightmare 5 font.

I added the title and author, stretched the text around a bit and added an outer glow to the text. The result turned out pretty good. (Pretty good for me, anyway.)

Step 5 – Resize for other versions

Finally, I resized the 300×300 to 48×48 and produced the following thumbnail.

With all the downloading, Photoshop fiddling, and playing around, it only took me about half an hour to produce the cover art.

 

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