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.