The Way Some People Die: Front Cover

Another cover for one of Macdonald's more intricately plotted novels. I've been drawn to collage a lot lately, and these two figures have been placed against a background texture made up of bits and pieces of a dark suit. The collage was then brought into Illustrator, where I used vector shapes (of the man and woman) as clipping masks - the result is the two figures cropped over the top of the collage. The pistol was brought in last. Firstly I ran a 'live trace' over it in Illustrator, which reduced it to a black and white shadow drawing (for want of a better description). I then added texture to this in Photoshop.

The Way Some People Die: Back Cover

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the back cover

The Underground Man: Front Cover

This cover took longer to create than I'd like to admit. My first four ideas ended in tears, before I decided to use pieces of my background to 'build' a coffin. I started with a photo of some ground taken at home. I then copied pieces of this ground and pasted them onto different layers, and then made them darker or lighter by adjusting the colour levels. These pieces built up the coffin which has a light border (created as a vector shape in Illustrator and dropped into Photoshop as pixels. I also then used a textured brush to rub out patches of the line). The figure holding the shovel was 'cut out' of more photos of the ground and selectively darkened. The back cover has a close-up of the coffin, of which I was pretty chuffed.

The Underground Man: Back Cover

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the back cover

The Drowning Pool: Front Cover

The second in my series of covers is for The Drowning Pool. This was a great Archer novel that was made into a movie in 1975 starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

The tiled background and blood spatter were painted in Photoshop using textured brushes.

The Drowning Pool: Back Cover

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the back cover

The Zebra-Striped Hearse: Front cover

This is the first in a series I've set myself to re-imagine the covers of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer series of detective novels. I think it's safe to say that with the exception of my dad, no one has taught me more about the important things in life than the ultra-cool Lew Archer. Where else could I have learnt how to track down missing persons, violent criminals and runaway spouses while all-the-while dispensing phlegmatic philosophies on the human condition? Nowhere I tell you. These covers are part design practice and part homage to the greatest detective novelist to ever pick up a pen.

The cover design is done in Illustrator, the elements are created in Photoshop.

The Zebra-Striped Hearse: Back cover

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the back cover

Christ

Red headed dude

U Portrait Close-up

A close up of the portrait showing all the U's.

Portrait Made of U's

Portrait in U. I created one U-shape with several u's, each in a different shade of grey. Then I layered them at different sizes using the photo as a guide.

A second T

More tees

Text Pattern: T

this pattern brought to you by the letter T

Another U Pattern

Pattern with Text: U

Another pattern made using the letter U. This one had some texture treatment in Photoshop after Illustrator.

Pattern

First try at creating a pattern.