Bad Cover Art…Redesigned: Murder Walks the Plank

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 you: Murder Walks the Plank

According to Google, Murder Walks the Plank is about a murder mystery cruise that suddenly turns sour when one of the cruise participants falls overboard, sparking an investigation for a killer! Can I get an Ooooooh? Also cats.

I now bring to you Murder Walks the Plank…Redesigned!

Thoughts – 

To be perfectly honest, this week I nearly forgot about doing a cover at all. I kept reminding myself only to forget a little while later. So on the way home last night I suddenly remembered again, got home and scrambled around to find a cover and throw everything together. I made this in about 20 minutes after I’d flailed for an hour not knowing what to do.

I first saw the cover and was like ‘Why is it pink? When it’s all murdery…’ and then I thought ‘Huh plank…plank…murder…OOOH IDEA!’

So essentially I thought it would be cool to find a texture that looked like decking and to play with my blood splat paint brushes again and voila! Murdery planky madness happened.

I think I understand why the original cover is how it is (although the cats confuse me…I’m thinking maybe they’re significant to the plot?). This book seems like an easy murder mystery read aimed at women. So in a sense I’ve probably re-marketed the book. The cover I’ve come up with probably belongs on a more serious crimey murdery (technical term) book but I still like it. I think you’d see it and get the general idea of what is going on in the book. Murder, blood, ship, fewer cats.

Process – 

This cover was pretty simple to put together.

Step 1 – Place texture on and have a fiddle. Desaturated and deepened contrast to get a more murky foreboding feel.

Step 2 – Have a play with Fonts. Originally I messed with the font a whole lot and put it on overaly and made this big halo around it and duplicated layers but then I thought it looked too fussy. So I stripped it back to a simple white and placed a slight Outer Glow on it.

Step 3 – Play with blood! Splattered blood all over the place and thought it looked cool across the font too.

Step 4 – Played with the brightness and contrast of blood to make it darker or more defined. Played with Blending Options too.

Step 5 – Add author name.

Elements – 

Main Font – Trajan Pro

Author Font – Tamil MN

Texture

Blood

Thanks for reading! Hope you like it. Let me know what you think 🙂