Bad Cover Art…Redesigned: Teen Witch

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: Teen Witch by Silver Ravenwolf

According to Amazon, Teen Witch isn’t actually a novel (I thought it was…oops?) but is actually a guide for young Wiccans in the ‘modern’ era (I’m thinking circa nineties judging by the clothes). It tells you about the fundamentals of being Wiccan and gives you spells such as fun spells, glamour spells, call me spells, don’t call me spells, call me maybe spells, etc.

I now bring to you Teen Witch…Redesigned!

Thoughts – 

Ok, so…in my defence I completely thought this was a novel when I started to redesign the cover so I designed it with that in mind rather than it being a sort of manual for witches otherwise I might’ve made some different decisions.

Technically I’ve been working on this cover for about a week. I started it when I made the previous cover because I wanted to get ahead a little but then I gave up because it was making me mad. I basically found a brush set of teenagery looking silhouettes and I’d seen the original cover before but had bypassed it because I wasn’t sure what I would do with it. Then I found the brush set and thought they would suit the title. I knew I wanted to have a strong background and then a silhouetted character in the middle. Originally I had this kind of swirly, blue light texture background but it was a little too dark and everything was a little lost. Also it was kind of flat. I’ve been doing a lot of relatively flat covers lately. By this I mean they have no depth to them, no perspective. It’s just a flat background with whatever I choose to slap on front of it. So I wanted depth this time.

I came to the idea of having winter trees and a path because I remembered a cover I made for Demeter a while ago now with a winter scene and a silhouetted character (I might link this when I get home). I set off in search of a nice patch background on this site I used to use a lot called SXC where they put up royalty free photographs or images that you can use without infringing copyright (I’ll link this in the elements section). I found a couple that were nice but nothing that worked well for a cover. Either they didn’t have the right proportions or there was nowhere for the text to go or the silhouettes didn’t fit well because the path was too distant. It was kind of driving me mental.

However, I remembered I usually saved all my old photoshop projects I did for YWSers. So I grabbed my external hard drive and started looking. Eventually I found the original photoshop file there and basically…I took it! So what you’re seeing in the cover is the original background image I used and changed for Demeter’s cover, except I lengthened it and made it more proportional. I also changed the silhouette from the one I had in Demeter’s cover because I liked this one better.

After finishing the cover I realised it was very similar to one I had seen recently. The cover for Sarah Rees Brennan’s Untold. I would maybe be dismayed that something else has a really similar cover but I think that if Teen Witch were a YA Fiction novel then at least I was pitching to the right market (at last). I really like the new cover, I keep just staring at it. It has this sense of mystery and intrigue to it and again I like the simplicity. If I had known it were a manual of sorts I probably would’ve done it differently. Maybe done something similar to the Gates of Hell cover I did. A notebook with scribbles all over it.

Process – 

Note: I can’t really remember what I did to the original image. I know that it was a photograph so I probably pulled the colour balance and contrast to extremes to get more solid colours. Also, looking at the photoshop file I whited out the path because in the original image it had tire tracks. So I whited those out and that gave the bottom of the trees and glowing effect.

Step 1 – Proportioned background onto a 6×9 inches base and whited out a few more elements.

Step 2 – Added silhouette and resized to fit in with the perspective of the image.

Step 3 – Gave silhouette an Outer Glow int he Blending Options to pick it out more from the background.

Step 4 – Used a random smoky brush I had to create a slightl shadow underneath the silhouette’s feet.

Step 5 – Added Font and resized to fit my needs.

Step 6- Added author name.

Elements – 

Main Font – Subway Novella (same as last week but I love it so much)

Author Font – Supernatral Knight (also love this one)

Background

Silhouette

Note: I can’t find the original image anymore but I know I got it from that free stock site so I’ve linked that instead.

Let me know what you think! 🙂