Morning peeps!
And here is a particularly splendid post for you all to enjoy. As you know, I have a short story named “A Sprig of Holly”. It was written for the first Christmas Lites charity anthology back in 2012, a sweet little adventure / romance written in the style of a Scandinavian folk tale (way, way before Frozen made it trendy. Afterwards I released it as a freebie with the hopes of spreading the word about the anthology a bit – all four of the current Christmas Lites anthologies are written in support of the NCADV, the American National Coalition against Domestic Violence.
Now as it was only an ebook, I bodged a cover until such time as I could get a decent one done, and that bodged cover was this:
(you may laugh, now I’ve got a better one). 
But despite this non-splendidness, this little story has grown and grown in popularity until it has become the most frequently-downloaded text I’ve uploaded.
Now for a while I have been playing with the idea of doing a couple of illuminated copies of some of the more fairytale of my stories, and I’ve been looking for a decent artist who might be able to do the illustrations. Someone suggested I should go and look on deviantart and I have to say, there are a lot of talented people on there. One of these is Wesley Souza, and he agreed to do an ebook cover for Sprig. Now, the development of this cover has been really interesting and I totally love the end result, so come with me on a journey through time and space (or at least through the last week or so) and let me show you just how talented an artist I have accidentally found.
So this is what we started with. I described Greta, a girl who lives with her grandfather in a cabin in the mountains, and the snowmaiden, a figure that Greta carves from snow. We looked at a few varied possibilities for Greta, but this was the best and the most striking visually. The blue lady behind had the right kind of remoteness for the snowmaiden.
This settled, Wesley began to work his magic. First he put them on the right kind of background, a snowy mountain landscape.
Then he put in a sunrise behind the mountain…
After that he did some work on Greta’s hair….
Followed by the snowmaid’s hair, and Greta’s sprig of holly…..
After that, look at the details of the trees in front of the snowmaid’s skirt…
And then the snowmaid’s body, as of course she is made of snow (and I love the details of the frost-patterns on her arms and face).
Finally we discussed font; placement, choice of styles, and colour. We played about a bit until it was right, and he added the sparkles, just to make it more magical. So are you ready? Because here is my gorgeous new cover, for your delectation:
For anyone who’d like to read more, it’s free at Smashwords and should be at Amazon here: http://getBook.at/Sprig .
Also, go check out the rest of Wesley’s stuff at Deviantart here: http://wesley-souza.deviantart.com/ as it’s pretty exceptional!
So what do you think, peeps? Better than my homegrown effort, no?
hehehehe.
JAC.
Wandering On Dark Shores.... 