**Note: You can click the pictures for a larger view.

Several months ago, my sister Nicole -the real writer in the family - finished writing a novel she was working on. It's young adult book called The Cupid Factor.

She had decided to self-publish through lulu.com, as many aspiring authors are doing nowadays. So after I formatted the manuscript properly for Lulu.com (using Adobe InDesign), it was time to whip up a cover.

My sister's vision was to have a cover reminiscent of some of the old young adult books she had read when we were kids. Usually those book covers featured close-ups on the characters that were the main focus of the story.

First I started off with pencil sketches of the main characters:

Once we agreed that these were cool, I scanned them in and brought them into Photoshop.

Normally when I do an illustration for comics, I start in pencil, then go over it in ink, and then scan it. However, as this was not for comics, this time I wanted a more colored pencil type look, and I decided to apply the color directly over the pencil.

One of the advantages of this approach was that all the shading I did in the pencil stage could work for me in Photoshop. I was able to lay down flat color over the pencil, and by using the "Multiply" setting in the layers palette, the color picked up all the shading nuances.

Additionally, the style of this piece was a bit "looser" than I usually do. Normally I painstakingly select each aspect of the picture (hair, eyes, lips, etc.), and only then apply the color. This time I brushed in the color using a large brush with a soft edge to it.

I should mention that I'm using a Wacom graphics tablet to do this, since it affords you a semblance of natural motion. Using a mouse it would be an exercise in frustration to pull it off.

Anyway, I did each face separately, then brought them into the same file to position them. Once I got them lined up the way I wanted, I messed around with some background patterns that I thought would look good.

Eventually, I settled on the small mosaic type pattern that you see in the image:

So now that the hard part was done, it was time to bring this picture into Illustrator so I could finish it up.

In case you're wondering, it wasn't exactly necessary to take this project into Illustrator. The rest could have been accomplished in Photoshop, but whenever I work with text, I prefer to do it in Illustrator to I can keep it as crisp lines (vector) as possible.

Creating text in Photoshop essentially turns your type into dots (raster), and it's just not as easy to work with text in Photoshop. Additionally, it's easier for me to create a press-ready pdf out of Illustrator than it is out of Photoshop.

For all you industry pros out there, yes I know that there are some Photoshop formats that allow you to keep vector type and well, it all gets rasterized eventually at print time, but I'm keeping this fairly simple.

So now in Illustrator, I refer to the size specifications on the Lulu.com website and use those to set up my document. I have to make the document about .125 inches wider and .25 inches taller than the final size. this is called the "bleed", and this part of the cover will be trimmed off at print time.

The bleed exists in case your artwork moves on the press at print time. If you didn't have that bleed and extend your artwork into it, then you'd most likely see a white line or other embarrassing gaffe that could cause you to stop printing and lose considerable money.

Conversely, all type and important artwork I will usually keep .25 inches inside the final area. Lulu didn't specify this as far as I know, but I like to do it to feel safe.

Ok, now that all that is done, I knew I wanted the cover to be "bursting". In Illustrator this is pretty simple to accomplish.

I made a couple of triangle, one pink and one a very light gray. Using the rotate tool, I was able to copy them over and over again 180 degrees to create the burst effect.

Then once that was done, it was time to create a new layer and import the picture of the characters that I did in Photoshop.

I'll usually separate different aspects of the project on different layers. It helps with organization and also helps with editing, as I can always lock or hide layers to get them out of the way when I need to.

Now with the photo in, I position it where I want it, and then I decided to drop on a couple of pieces of clip art that I had, namely the heart and the cupid figure. To spruce them up a bit, I added drop shadows around them, and it helped set them off the page a bit.

Now for the text. On yet another layer, I chose the fonts for my sister's name and the name of the book. Text layers I always keep toward the top if at all possible. Adobe recommends this due to issues of "flattening". Flattening occurs when Illustrator is forced to combine transparent rasters with vector objects.

If your text is "under" one of these raster objects (such as our drop shadows on the heart or cupid), then the text could get rasterized, ie turned into dots instead of mathematical vector lines. This generally yields lower quality text so it's best to avoid this whenever possible.

So with that done, it's time to concentrate on the back cover. With most of the elements done, I copied the file and deleted the author name and title, as well as the photoshop image.

Then I placed in the color version of "Kendra" (the female character). To crop the image to just the eyes, I used a "mask". To make a mask I just place a box on top of the image and select the create mask option from the Object menu.

Once this is done, nothing outside of the bounds of the topmost box will be visible, so I just resized that to the width of the document and shrunk it to reveal only the eyes. To keep it consistent with the front cover, I added the bars and the heart and cupid art.

After this, I made a new layer on the top and placed the copy that my sister had written for the back there.

Strangely, Lulu did not add the price to the book, so I had to add that myself, while at the same time leaving enough space at the bottom right for the barcode, which Lulu.com would place on themselves.

So it looked a little off balance at the bottom, but once the barcode was there it all worked out.

As it turned out, Lulu.com preferred PNG files for the cover, so I then exported both files from Illustrator to a PNG file (which is actually a raster format), and uploaded them during the step-by-step publishing process over at Lulu.

For the size book that my sister was publishing (approx. 6x9), Lulu did not allow you to really "design" the spine of the book. You can pick a font, and a background color, but unless you do a dust-cover wraparound, you can't do much more than that.

So anyway, that's the sordid tale of the cover of The Cupid Factor. If you like young adult or know anyone who likes young adult books, please feel free to let them know about it and send them the link above.