Odds And Ends (random book)

old book covers

January 30, 2021

As I was going through my folders and cloud, rearranging files, I rummaged through my archive folder and found most of my old covers. Turns out I never synced the offline and online drives well, so some are missing. But most of them I have, and I thought I'd share them here. Most of them aren't good, but it doesn't matter.

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I'll start with the covers for this random book:

There's only been two others. I doubt anyone remembers the first one. It was the third cover I ever did, I think. At the time, the random book only had a few views and no favorites. The second recently retired one became the basis for most of my book covers, especially with font and colors in mind (it's all just Calibri now, nothing fancy).

Fun fact: the name comes from a pack of bacon at Trader Joe's, named for giving you uselessly cut pieces of bacon at half the price and twice the quantity of normal packs, the ones that fell off the line for being uneven or something. Not sure if they still sell it, but it was a great deal.

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Now for the Specialized Writing Guide. There's been a lot:

Of course, there can only be one cover. This was the very first book posted to my Wattpad account, and has the most covers. When the Specialized Writing Guide went up, I didn't even have the barn owl logo. That very first purple and pink mess was also my first attempt at this account's logo/stamp. In the end, I just mixed some shapes together and it turned out miles better than my previous attempts. It made its way off the writing guide's cover to match the aesthetic I adopted from the random book's cover. The fourth one, the cat silhouette that lightens as it goes out, almost became the cover. I still like the looks. So long as I change the font around, it could be a special edition cover. But the full-body cat walking across the tightrope wins in the end.

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Next, A Reign of Thunder and Lightning, my first posted fanfic:

This cover was, by far, the one that took the most work to get right. At the time, I didn't want to use vectors. But my drawing skills were (and still are, to an extent) terrible. Yet there I was, trying a full-blown digital painting. I drew each individual hair with a stroke on an art tablet. It took forever. The end result sucked. And the cover didn't stick around for more than a year. But I didn't like that repainting, either, and it was scrapped for (in my opinion) a much better lit one less than a year after that. I wanted it to be the aesthetic for all my covers going forward. But, just to humor the actual artistic skill I have, I did one in vectors and liked it infinitely more than anything I could paint. I have repainted this cover three times already. It's basically become a benchmark for my digital painting skills at this point. Certainly, I'll go back to it.

That colorless one in the middle depicts a scene from A Reign of Thunder and Lightning. I had the idea to do it with Bleed, but first I had to do it here. I couldn't draw the war paint of a Avro Lancaster, or stones, or metal textures, or fur (still!) and that was three years after the very first cover. One of these nights. Maybe...

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Last is Bleed. I had the most ambitious ideas for it:

Bleed was brought in around the time I decided to go with vectors for all my covers. However, the very first one in this image was done long before A Reign of Thunder and Lightning was finished! A few of you may recognize the base image used: it's a picture originally depicting Scourge's death from Deviantart. It's much higher quality than what I reduced it to here. But that image alone gave me the idea for a book called Warriors: Bleed in the first place. Yay, that image!

The row of cats in the snow was an idea for an animatic that would've accompanied Bleed's launch, depicting a dead cat slowly freezing over in a pile of red-tinted snow. That never happened, of course, but I kept the images. I had made a teaser for A Reign of Thudner and Lightning I've since set to private (it's not good. I made it in an hour in my college computer lab). I may have remembered how to use After Effects, but I didn't remember how to use Animate, which I'd last used under Flash CS5. I didn't have the time, anyway. The tailer went up on Youtube and was set to private two years later, after a whopping ten views! It did get featured by a Warriors Wattpad group, though.

The vector images seemed to get progressively less violent as I slowly drained the color out of them. I think Bleed's cover came out pretty good. I personally like the whole single-color thing.

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And those are the book covers I've made so far. Stellar Roar's cover is not here; there's only ever been one. I'd say use them as reference, but most aren't that good. I just thought I'd be fun to post them. I'm content with how much my digital painting skills have improved, despite not using it on any covers. Maybe one of these nights...