I got a fun batch of fun speculative fiction covers recently, and this was no exception. Coincidently, I met the author over a local writer’s Zoom call in the middle of the pandemic, then met her in person at the annual Realm Makers conference in St. Louis. For her upcoming collection of short stories, she asked if I would design the cover, which I eagerly jumped at.

This cover was unique in that the author decided to print it through Minibük, which is a (Swedish?) company that prints tiny volumes that are only a few inches tall and easy to pass out as table favors at book conventions. The featured stories are connected to her larger story world, so it was a good way to introduce people to some of her characters and lore.

I bought myself a new font (as usual, because I have no self control) and hunted for stock photography that could depict a main scene from one of her stories. (There’s dragons in it, so how can I not play with fire??)

I had a lot of fun adding smoke to the title treatment and playing with blending layers to get the flames to light the character the way I wanted (and also hide some of my Photoshop blending).

Now for the whacky behind the scenes. The first image is what the cover looks like without lighting and adjustment layers. You can see that my background image of an abandoned house is actually overwhelmingly blue (not the color you want in a burning building image).

The second image is taking it a step further, where I turned off most of the blending layers as well, which shows you a more unedited version of the flames and smoke. Blending layers cause the layer to interact with layers beneath it, depending on the amount of light vs dark pixels there are on the layer. In the case of the flames, they all came on black backgrounds, so blending layers that take out the darkest pixels will give the most believable affect.

For a better, at-a-glance look, here’s the front cover in its three stages of development (though, disclaimer, blending options and adjustment layers are a primal part of my workflow, so I can’t imagine actually building a cover in stages like this).

I do admit that the blue room with the flames in the second image has some appeal to it, so maybe I’ll save that tactic for a supernatural or urban fantasy as some point. But for now, here’s hoping you enjoyed the breakdown of this cover.