Infused Cover Design

As I got close to completing the writing of Infused, my mind started wandering to what the cover of my book should look like. Geoff’s use of his powers in many cases would be difficult to express in a single picture, and many of the scenarios that I thought of would not express the extent of his powers well.

I finally decided that the best scene from the story to use for the cover would be of Geoff standing on the moon looking back at the Earth. I also wanted him to be shoeless, even though in the book he was not alone when he was barefooted on the moon.

In wanting to make a mock-up of the cover I didn’t want to spend any money or bother anyone else with the attempt, so I ended up playing Geoff in the picture. I stood in front of a wall looking toward it (barefooted of course) in a dramatic pose, and my daughter took a picture of me. I later found out that we didn’t have the flash turned on, but that actually worked out better as it looked more natural in the final composition with light coming from the side and mainly lighting the top of half of my body.

Next, I looked around the internet for a picture of Earth and of the moon. I wasn’t worried about copyright since they would only be for personal use, so I just grabbed the first things that I thought might work. The satellite image of Earth that I found looked pretty good, but it was really too crisp when it was combined with the black and white lunar shot that was taken by one of the Apollo missions that I was using, so I ended up blurring it a bit.

The image editing software that I have is about ten years old, so it is fairly limited in what it can do. It took me hours of editing the picture of myself to remove all of the background so that I could overlay it on the rest of the scene. I also had to get rid of my beard (since Geoff did not have one) and I even had to erase part of the bottom of my rib cage since at the angle the picture was taken my rib was sticking out further than my chest.

Once I had the three images ready to be merged, I created a starscape by putting colored dots on a black image that was the size of the desired finished product and then I added the lunar and Earth pictures. Next, I added the picture of myself on top of that, and put the title of the book across the Earth.

The final product was not wonderful by any means, but it did get the idea across pretty well. I also realized at that point that I should have stretched the image of myself out some since Geoff is supposed to be seven inches taller than I am, but I knew that the finer details could wait until a better version could be created in its entirety later on.