author of The Mermaid’s Tale, and other works
BANNER – Commissioned from VistaPrint. Designed myself modifying the templates – so no snark please.
The image is from a photograph of mine from my home town. Fossil Cove is just on the edge of town, Dalhousie, a cove just off the Inch Arran beach (it’s a terrible beach, a field of rocks, but go figure, it’s the tourist site). This is one of the ‘flowerpot’ rocks, exotic shapes carved by ferocious tides. This rock is so big you can literally walk right underneath it.
OKAY – Here goes. You need a cover. You have no money. You can’t pay an artist. You have no talent, you can’t draw or do artwork. What do you do?
Well, you get sneaky. I was doing a book, B-Movie Monsters in Love! It’s just a personal project, it’s a fun book and I want it to be out there in the world. But I’m a quirky eccentric guy, and this is a really quirky eccentric book. So while I want it to be available, I don’t know that it will sell. At all. But I need a cover.
The Book’s theme is mainly deconstructing movie monsters. So that’s where I’m heading. I need a picture of a monster. Preferably a public domain picture, one without copyright issues. You can find public domain images if you keep your head around you and look around. Anything from the 19th or early 20th century can be fair game. We’re up to 1931 in the United States. Any image you can find that’s earlier than that is reliably public domain. Some of the stuff after that – from say Night of the Living Dead, or the Hideous Sun Demon is in Public Domain because the registrations got screwed up – you can get a screen capture from those. Or outside the US, the limitation period is 70 years after the death of the creator.
You can also buy ‘stock photo’ images with a legal license to use, from places like Alamy and Adobe. Some cover artists use them. I haven’t.
I poked around and poked around, and I found a really nice poster for the original Lost World, the 1926, Willis O’Brien stop motion animated film. Due to copyright registration issues, the film and its materials had gone into public domain long ago. This was safe.
Just a little relaxation project, while I’ve been working on other stuff. This is another collection in the same vein of Dawn of Cthulhu, Fall of Atlantis and Murder Chickens on Mars.
The cover art, by the way, is taken from the original poster for the 1925 film, The Lost World, now in public domain. I’ve cropped out the poster for everything but the dinosaur, switched to B&W and played with tints, textures and contrasts till I had something representing the old gray-skinned, leathery/rubbery stop motion dino look, slapped a border around and set it in red to make it pop.