Lydia’s Golden Drum
Cover Designer: Neale Osborne
Comments about cover design
This e-book is the sequel to my published debut ‘Lydia’s Tin Lid Drum’, and so the design had to be in keeping with that original book jacket. For the first cover, the colors (and ‘tinny’ foil effects) were added by my art director at Oxford University Press, and the lettering was by calligrapher Stephen Raw. For this self-published e-book, though, I was on my own, producing each element of the artwork separately in black-and-white, then adding ‘burnished’ effects in photoshop, and placing my own ‘Golden’ letters within the original calligraphy. The whole process took weeks of tinkering and dramatic ‘rethinkering’ to balance the many decorative elements and capture the spicy, fiery exoticism of this Arabian Nights-inspired tale.
An eye catcher!
Although your eye is drawn away from the main character after the initial look, the cover is very eye-catching. All the small images make me curious about the story, like “how do they fit in?” and make me want to open the book and find out.
I like this cover because it looks artistic and kind of like a paper cutting piece.
Congratulations! This cover has made it to the finals! Vote for this cover by commenting about what you like about it, and by sharing on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest using the links above. The more shares, the more votes this cover will get!
Winners are determined by number of comments (one or two word comments don’t count) and combined number of shares. Please only share once a day, we don’t want to spam any social media!
As striking as the colors are, I think this cover is too busy. There is way too much happening. All the images above pull focus from the Lydia, which is too bad because the illustration of her looks very nice. I’d get rid of the extraneous material and enlarge the illustration of your protagonist, so that it presents a more dominant and striking image to draw the eyes of potential buyers.