A New Old Cover

The newer, but now old cover for the paper edition

Nothing exciting to talk about this post – just like every other post. One thing that is new – is that I have a new cover for the paper version of The Bright Black Sea. I had updated it this summer, twice, in fact. The cover above was the second version. I flipped the cover art and changed the title to light blue to make it easier to read. However, I had time on my hands, and seeing that's the devil's playground, I decided play around with it. My major incentive was to rewrite the back page blurb, but it was mostly just for something to do. Since I rarely sell any of the paper version of any of my books, making changes to them is almost pure art – an exercise in creativity. In the process of revising my blurb box I came across all my old designs and decided to see how I might redesign the entire cover using the art I used for the first edition.

I thought I might well go through the steps of creating the new cover art, so below is the actual starting point of the art for the cover, As you can see, it is not a space scene, but a rather abstract rather Chinese style landscape.

The original painting in its original orientation.

In the image software program Gimp, I take this rather abstract landscape, and “inverse” its color, flip the image and then rotate it to change the image into this:

Colors inverted, flipped and rotated. The house is still visible in lower right hand corner

I smudge out the house, adjust the color brightness and contrast to get the image to "pop" a bit more, and then add a glowing star in the center of the nebula using the “nova” filter in Gimp to get this image:

This was similar to my original cover art.

I wasn't quite happy just yet, and playing around with the filters in Gimp, I found one that adjust the color temperature of the art, making it a bit warmer, richer toned, to get it to look like this:

A slightly warmer, richer tone, a bit more inviting, I think.

Below is the finished cover, after I eliminated that white rectangle and adding the title and the new back cover blurb box. I used the same art rotated for the back cover. 

The new cover with the old, original art.

For comparison, below is the original ebook cover. At the time of first publication, I did not offer paper books.

I will keep my current ebook cover, as I like it, and since it is usually only seen in thumbnails, the larger title comes in handy. However, I don’t think that large text would work well on a paper book.