Magic Cover Shop Under Construction: Day 2

Check it out and scroll down.

You will see this crazy collage of a bunch of covers I made for people in the shop. I counted them. I have made 125 different covers for people, some of them recurring customers.

But 125! Accomplishment! :D

Just needed to say it :) I've come such a long way.

See ya later, alligators! :D

Magic Cover Shop Under Construction: Day 1

I think I can brag about this. Some of you might not have known my cover shop on Figment before, but let me just say it was a complete mess with a banner I made from wallpapers, sample covers were all different sizes, there were just waaayyy too many words, and nothing was neat.

If I went to my shop, I would get tired of reading all those words, geesh! :/

BUT I worked TWO and a HALF HOURS to get it all cleaned up. I had meant to do this for a long time and FINALLY I have done it! :D

I gave it a new LEGAL banner I made myself, a face for my shop (a Magic Fox!), and even though the Cover Example section is under construction, I have a cool logo for it.

Please, check out this hard work :)

And may the foxes be with you! (Star Wars reference).

What Really Happened: "The Princess and the Frog"

The classical story of "The Princess and the Frog" is about a princess meeting a frog, falling in love, kissing the frog, and turning him back into a prince. Then they live happily ever after.

Yet, that is not the true story.

Once upon a time, there was a cat named Princess who had, since kittenhood, been owned by an middle-aged woman in the countryside. Princess loved to go out into the garden and explore. One rainy day she met a frog, which, out of cat instincts, chased around the garden. But the frog was too fast and soon Princess gave up the chase.

As she sat by the fountain cleaning her whiskers, the frog hopped by to congratulate her on her quick movements through the crowded garden. Soon the two get talking, different species but with something in common which neither of them know the other has.

The Princess was actually a real Princess kidnapped when she was only a two, by the middle-aged woman (an evil witch) who wishes to destroy the Kingdom. The Queen died giving birth to her heir and the King is devastated he can't find his long lost daughter and he falls ill. It was only a matter of time before he dies and the Kingdom goes to war.

The frog was actually a Prince turned into a frog by the same evil witch. He is the Prince of the neighboring Kingdom which collapsed after the witch changed him into a frog and killed his parents.

The witch's ultimate goal is to destroy both kingdoms and pose as a savior by making herself Queen with her powers.

Later, both Princess and Frog fall in love and, though they do think it is strange they feel this way, a way they thought only humans could feel, they both want to kiss the other. When they do, they both change back. It is here that the Princess finds out the frog was human and the frog finds out Princess was not a cat.

In the end, the evil witch is banished and threatened that if she did return, she would be ruthlessly killed. Finally, the two kingdoms unite as the Princess and the Prince get married. The Princess' father regains his health after.

The reason the story we know today has only the Prince as the changed one is because it would've been harder to believe if both of them were changed.

CD Jacket Idea: Patches of Life

Patches of Life: Front CD Jacket
I just wanted to design something. So I made this CD jacket. The patches of red poppy were created by using PicMonkey's black-and-white feature. I just clicked on the areas that I wanted to be the original color. Since the paintbrush is circular I was able to make these cool Swiss-cheese like patches. The little diamond-made-of triangles was added just because I felt it would look right. I did mess around with the idea of putting something more on but then...it would just be too busy.

Patches of Life: Back CD Jacket
For the back I took the exact same picture and toned down the contrast a bit in the PicMonkey feature "Exposure" which is truly awesome cuz sometimes if you mess around with it right, you can find things appear on darker pictures that had been darkened on purpose. The musical note is a PicMonkey overlay symbol. I thought, well, if I'm going with this CD jacket idea I might as well add on a music note. Just because. I messed around with putting on the diamond-made-of-triangles but settled on this simple music note. I put it on three times, the first two slightly off to make it look bolded, you know, like this. Just a PicMonkey embossing/shadow trick :)

The white circles are just white graphic circles with the inner color as transparent. Wait...is transparent a color???

Anyway, I also put the title of the CD, or rather the name of it, small on the top because it seemed right.

Finally, the awesome font is called Etharnig No12. Got some great vibes to it, I'll say :D

Totally Spies Spin-off Story: Totally Styles

Have you guys seen Totally Spies? You can watch almost all the episodes on YouTube.

Anyway, this cover is a sort of spin-off story of Totally Spies.

Amelia "PopTart Princess" Rainer is a top secret fashion agent. She works for a secret agency which keeps the elite fashion of young women in check and makes sure there is no fashion disaster in high schools and universities.

The idea for this as a book is several short stories along with fashion advice and pictures and shots of Amelia in action. Like the girls in Totally Spies she uses gadgets and physical skills to fight fashion evil like companies trying to bring back the old styles which is against the law in this world.

Amelia can rock anything from motorcycles to scooters, turning everything into whatever is "in and now" with her secret weapons and quick-change talent.

Yet, none of her friends suspect her secret identity despite the fact that she is the fashion guru at her university. Even though she is still a sophomore, many people look up to her even some of the teachers who ask her for fashion advice from time to time.

When she acts as secret agent her code name is PopTart Princess for her signature two-toned fashion style. Her hair is colored pastel pink and pastel blue every time she transforms into PopTart Princess with a special spray she created with the help of scientists at the agency.

The story follows her just like Totally Spies, from the beginning of her career as secret fashion agent through many episodes of saving the world from fashion disasters, some outright crazy. The stories will also take a look at her personal life as the daughter of a wealthy car dealer Dad and a makeup crazy Mom. She has four younger siblings, the two youngest are twin boys who are still at that age where they exhaust Mom and Nanny everyday pulling pranks and running around in their large mansion. Even though Amelia lives away from home in her own apartment, her overprotective Dad makes it hard for her to do her secret job.

Follow Amelia through her chaotic, but fun and exciting life being a normal fashion guru by day and a secret agent by night. But sometimes she may be called at unexpected times.

PopTart Princess to the rescue!

Fairies, Pixies, Love, and Adventure

Idea Behind the Cover:

Only in the state of a daydream can you glimpse the realm of the fairies and pixies. And only a small handful of people can maintain that state long enough to have an out-of-body experience and enter into the magical world. A young man meets a fairy during one of these visits and falls in love. Soon he becomes involved in evil-doings of humans who use those daydreamings to do terrible experiments on fairies and pixies.

Once in several hundred years can fairies and pixies pass through to the human world. Yet the Portal is only open for one day. A fairy's or pixie's magic will come through the Portal so as the day arrives and the planets in both human and magical realm align with one another, the evil-doers kidnap fairies, pixies, and other magical creatures. One of the kidnapped fairies happens to be the very fairy which the young man falls in love with. The evil-doers have experimented on the magical creatures long enough and know how to extract the magical essence from those creatures. Without the essence, the creatures are weak.

But in the magical realm there is an ancient forest with a large tree centuries old that scatters the dust of this essence into the air. If the magical creatures do not reach this tree and inhale this dust in time, they will die.

Now the young man must save the fairy he loves and her friends. He finds allies who, like him, can maintain a long state of daydreaming. Together with warriors of the magical realm, good will fight evil both in the human world and the magical realm. In the end, who will win?

Fantasy-isque: Radient = Radiant

Scarlet Dusk. I was going to put a subtitle: "After a long storm is a radient sunset" meaning that there is always light at the end of a dark tunnel, or more like, when you go through something really terrible, you shouldn't lose hope because something good is waiting for you at the end. I didn't put the subtitle for two reasons; one, I had no space and two, it made the whole cover look crammed and messy and too complicated.

I'd like to explain a little about the lines and squares in the middle. Just a little. That design is purely experiment. It's just me seeing if it'll look good. I have done anything like that but I did want to put something in there because it looked like something was missing.

And the font is inspired by "Owl City" font. If you listen to his music on OwlCityVEVO on YouTube, he often uses this very simple font with spaces between the letters and it seems very fantasy-like somehow. Futuristic fantasy but not scifi.

The background picture is a pic from my Grandfather, my Grampy. He sent me, er, rather the whole rest of the family, pictures of autumn in his area. Instead of toning down the colors and making it pastel, I decided to do the exact opposite of what I normally do, brighten it. Yes, I was experimenting.

OMG! I just found out I spelled "radient" wrong it's "radiant". Well, let's just say it is a made-up word that I made and it means the same thing. Otherwise I'm in a pickle cuz I made a CD cover version, too.

Background photo is an original photo.

Radient and radiant mean the same thing, okay? OKAY? Yes, let's leave it at that.


On to the next cover!

This cover is that idea of "Don't pay attention to the man behind the curtain" from The Wizard of Oz. I was experimenting with the overlay effect and found that the butterfly-white-overlay effect could do amazing see-through things when put on the black silhouette. I was going to go legal with this but decided that, aw heck with it! I'm going to go all non-legal this whole entire cover.

I wanted to give this cover some kind of playful, yet mysterious vibe. There is no specific idea behind the cover just something to do with the person behind the curtain and the girl in the pic maybe sees something or gets involved in some kind of mysterious fantasy-like incident. I tried to imagine this cover as a real cover and wanted to make it like something I would pick up if I saw this in a bookstore.

The ocean and sky photo is an original photo.

This isn't really a cover, meaning that it's not cover size, but I did want to share it here. I once had this crazy epic dream and if you go HERE it's Chapter 7, if you're interested in reading it, it's a Dream Fiction series. The moon looked almost like it does in the pic. Really, it was SUCH an epic dream I went over and over with it in my head so I wouldn't forget it by the time I had time to write it up.


Since we're keeping with the fantasy vibe, here's another one.

Title: From Fantasy to Reality

This is a design, NOT a cover. But nonetheless, it is still something I made. Okay, so the background ocean is a pic I got from a friend and idk if it's legal or not. It might not be. But everything else on the pic is legal. So, I was experimenting again. I had this door png that I really wanted to use so I put it on the seashore of the original ocean pic.

The city in the door is supposed to show another reality or another world. When I was making it I put the same overlay city (legal png) slightly sliding it left or right to make it look all different. I pasted it on as an image and erased the parts I didn't want (you can do that crazy good stuff on PicMonkey free). The door, the ocean pic, the city png are all layered twice and the door is layered in a way to try to make it look 3D. Hope I did a good job?

I also used PicMonkey space effect to give the sky a fantasy feel and again, like "Scarlet Dusk", I did the opposite of what I normally do, I made it brighter instead of pastel/washed.

The idea behind the design is that, you are in paradise but then you must open the door to return to reality again. Reality is the city, paradise is the beach and the ocean. And the door is the only thing connecting you and reality.



The End :P

Hope you're all having a great summer. And for those doing CampNaNoWriMo, you can do it, you're almost there! :D

Happy Writing! :D