Bad Cover Art…Redesigned: Bronx Angel

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: Bronx Angel by Ed Dee

According to Amazon, Bronx Angel is about a wall in the Bronx that mysteriously starts seeping holy water. Now a place of pilgrimage for large numbers of people, no one expects a car to drive up with a dead mobster inside. The case seems simple but nothing is simple in New York. Nothing. Nooooooothing.

I now bring to you Bronx Angel…Redesigned!

Thoughts – 

I actually stared this cover a couple of weeks ago and kept putting off posting it because I couldn’t decide whether I liked it or not. I started by having a trawl through Amazon once again, thinking it might be interesting to do a crime genre. I stumbled across the cover above and whilst not horrifically bad it just seemed kind of wrong? I really dislike how HUGE and randomly place the font looks. Also the fact that it’s purple doesn’t exactly scream ‘I am a crime novel!’ I just thought it could be much more moody than it currently was.

I knew that I wanted to keep the urban vibe happening and I sort of love alleyways because they give off such a cool vibe by themselves. So I started to look around on deviantart for a suitable picture. I found the background I used above and really liked it and the angle sort of gave it something extra. Initially I wanted some sort of dark silhouette to give off a Noirish vibe because cities and gangsters and what not just kind of makes my head go ‘Nooooir!’ The only problem was that anytime I tried to add a silhouette it would just disappear in the background or look odd with the more realisitc photo behind it. When I tried to put some light around it, it just looked weirder still.

I started to look for something more realistic to place in the alleyway. I did think about leaving it with just the alley but it just seemed too empty, I felt like there had to be something else there. I found the picture of the lady in the box and whilst it doesn’t really bare much resemblance to what the summary suggests the novel is about…I thought it looked kind of cool.

I’m still not entirely convinced that I like the cover I made but I’m also fed up of fiddling with it. I even started to redesign my design but then I was too tired and my wrist hurt too much to continue. So this is what you get! I think the redesign captures a mood much better than the original one. Or at least I think it makes it look more gritty. I’m not sure if the novel is gritty or is lighter but I think I’d pick up my cover rather than the original.

Process – 

Step 1 – Adjusted the background to be more compositionally pleasing for me as a book cover

Step 2 – Adjusted the colour balance, contrast and lightness to get a moodier effect

Step 3 – Began to play around with the Font. I spent a long time trying to figure out what fonts I wanted. Whether I wanted different fonts or different colours or if I wanted the font to look like it was laid down on the ground. I duplicated the ‘angel’ font to make it bright, set the layer to Overlay and put an outer glow on it.

Step  4 – Played around with the silhouettes, trying to get something that worked.

Step 5 – Cut out the body and then placed it onto the background. Played with the perspective and also the colour balance, saturation, hue, contrast, lightness, etc.

Step 6 – Added some blood pools. Darkened them and reduced the opacity slightly.

Step 7 – Added some black mist to darken the whole image (you can’t really see this but it makes a difference)

Step 8 – Added author name.

Elements – 

Bronx Font – Urban Jungle

Angel Font – Beyond Sky

Author Font – Trajan Pro

Background

Body

Mist

Blood pool

Thanks for taking a look!