Bad Cover Art…Redesigned: Murder on the Mainline

Welcome to Bad Cover Art…Redesigned! Where I bring you the most horrible of all cover art I can find on the world wide web and try to come up with an alternative (that I hope is better).

This week I bring to you: Murder on the Mainline

According to Amazon, Murder on the Mainline is the first book in the Michael Claymore series. Michael Claymore is a truck driver who has training in criminology (obviously) and along with his mistress he fights crime! Apparently a lot…given the emphasis on ANOTHER on the original cover.

I now bring to you Murder on the Mainline…Redesigned!

Thoughts – 

So I had one of those weeks where I kind of forgot I had to make a cover and confessed so to the lovely Cadi who then went and found this glorious book cover for me (Yay Cadi!) Immediately I thought of maybe the interior of a train and bloody seats and then I found pictures of train tracks and some things just clicked in my brain so I went down that route. I found the above photo and again liked the simplicity of it. It’s similar to the Murder Walks the Plank cover that I made earlier.

Admittedly I was a little lazy this week. I could’ve worked on this cover a lot more and probably made it a lot better but life kind of got in the way. Such as my mother visiting! She actually chose the font because I couldn’t decide what I wanted. Mum’s thoughts were that it fit better with the background than what I previously had because it looks kind of broken down. I still think it doesn’t quite work but I don’t have time to fix it at the moment. I did think it would be cool to have maybe a looming shadow or even like a girl laid to the side of the tracks but I think I’d have to actually take that picture myself or spend an awful lot of time I don’t have trying to photoshop it (sorry!)

Anywho! Whilst I think the redesigned cover could be infinitely better I still think in it’s current state it works a lot better than the original cover. I think there is more of a mood to the redesigned cover and it would fit more easily into the crime genre rather than the original that kind of makes the book look factual. Also blood…blood is cool.

Process – 

Step 1 – Adjusted background image from portrait to landscape and then played with the colour balance and contrast to make it look more mooooody.

Step 2 – Added the font and had a play around with placing and style of font.

Step 3 – Added blood spatter and used the emboss feature to give it more of that shiny 3D quality

(Told you I was lazy this week)

Elements – 

Font – Rusted Plastic

Background

Blood Spatter

Thanks for looking! I’m off next week but I’ll try to make the next one muuuch better 🙂