One of the nice things about this project is that it rewards hoarders. I kept the little fimo orange slices from a (still unfinished) project I was working on last year.

Every time I make these magnets, I make them in a batch of 28, because that’s how much resin my measuring cups will hold.  It took a lot of sticky trial and error to get that down.

The one with the zipper is everyone’s favorite.  It swings freely.

I used to use scraps from my little books for the background paper in these, but the scrapbook papers commonly available are just as nice. You can’t see them perfectly well anyway.

The one at the top with the orange flowers is one of my favorites.

I experimented with different things to set in the resin, and some were more successful than others.  The gold leaf didn’t have that lovely suspended quality I had hoped for.  The small metal button in the bottom one is nice, though the glare of the light (which was even filtered!) makes it hard to see. I don’t like the clear glass bead as much, but the pearls and filigreed heart are great.

So here’s the cover art I decided on for my novel, SEEING THINGS.  I had thought about using a teacup for a motif anyway, and the idea came to me that it would be cool if the title of the book were written in tea leaves. (A tea leaf reading impacts the plot of the novel.)  So I went to a coffee shop I frequent and asked for “a large black tea, hold the water.” Then I brewed it and drank the tea.  Using a palette knife, I arranged the leaves until they read the title. I did some other shots with my hand, and some with different lighting too. I tried to make a second shot with the leaves forming a shape (a skull is all I could think of) but it didn’t look as cool.

On one hand, this isn’t as good a cover as the one with our model, because urban fantasy novels almost always have a hot chick on the cover. On the other hand, the cover was so cool that I grinned for about two hours solid after I made it.  Two hours of grinning feels right to me.

For those who are now curious about the book, here’s a link to smashwords, where it is currently available. It’s free for a limited time, so if you’re interested in it at all, now is the time to download it. It will be available from at the kindle store on Amazon soon.

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/66778

This is the first mockup for the cover of my novel, SEEING THINGS, which will be epublished later this summer.  To start with, I used the painted background which I made using acrylic, stamps, and layers of black gesso.  After photographing it, I scanned it and then played with the color to get a brighter red (since my acrylics are cheap and have more of a red-iron-oxide hue.)

I knew I wanted some textural background, so I wrote out a note from the novel in copperplate script on a piece of parchment with a dip pen. I also drew some images from an old book on witchcraft I have. I combined both of them with the photograph I did of titan buff and gesso on watercolor paper.

I think that if I were to do it again, I’d skip the titan buff colored texture. I wanted to have something close to the model’s skin color to mesh together so that her skin had a texture to it, but the problem is that I had a hard time not making it lighten up the red background I’d spent so long making. Once I’m more proficient in Gimp, I think I’ll be able to figure it out. Somehow I managed to do the cool masking/transparency thing with the text so that where I’d written in black, it showed up clearer and lighter. I’m not sure how I did that, but I’m keeping it.

To get the model’s skin to look like that, I moved the image to Microsoft Photo editor and used their effects tab “watercolor” feature twice.  I think I’d rather just do it once, but microsoft photo editor doesn’t have the same depth of “undo” that gimp has.

What kind of book do you think this cover is for?