Walker Long's Blog, page 7

Cover Art: Like a Good Neighbor

The background of this book cover is supposed to look like a television screen. To accomplish that, I just took a public domain photo of a football game and overlayed a scanline pattern. The silhouette was easy enough to draw. Silhouettes are also awesome because you can imply naughty things without getting in trouble. The title font might remind you of a certain insurance company logo. But I figure, hey, they don’t own Franklin Gothic.

Excerpt: The Plot Stiffens

Here’s a short excerpt from my book Invasion of the Snatch Snatchers for your reading pleasure.

The next morning Ray heard a clattering sound at his window as he was stumbling out of bed. He shrugged it off and headed to the bathroom. Ray and his sister shared a bath. It had two doors – one leading to Maya’s room and the other to Ray’s. The door from Ray’s room was locked, however, which meant that Maya was using the bath.

The window clattered again and Ray, since he had nothing better to do, went to check it out. He looked outside just in time to see Austin toss a handful of gravel. The tiny stones pinged off his window with a dreadful racket. Ray threw open the sash and stuck his head out.

“What the fuck, man?” he yelled down. “Ring the goddamn doorbell!”

“Shhhh,” Austin admonished. “I need to talk to you.” Ray closed the window and pulled on a pair of torn jeans. Maya would be preening in front of the mirror all morning, so Ray had time to play along with this game. Besides, Austin wasn’t going to give up easily. He would just start tossing bits of the driveway at the window until Ray came downstairs.

“All right,” Ray said with a yawn as he padded across the driveway in bare feet. “This better be good.”

“First, tell me this,” Austin looked intensely at Ray. “Who was the first girl you ever hooked up with?”

“It was Mary Sue Leighton. Everybody knows that.” Austin narrowed his eyes at Ray.

Neither boy said anything for a moment. They just stood there looking at each other – Austin with an eyebrow cocked in exaggerated skepticism and Ray squinting against the morning sun.

Finally Ray tossed up his hands. “Oh, all right! I told everybody that I made it with Mary Sue, but she just let me touch her bra in exchange for copying my algebra homework. Happy?”

“Oh, thank God,” Austin pulled Ray into a tight hug. “You’re still you.”

“Have you been sniffing glue?” Ray twisted out of Austin’s grip. “What the hell is wrong

with you?”

“Dude,” Austin insisted sincerely. “We are in the middle of some serious shit. My mom is

not my mom.”

“What are you saying?” Ray took a few steps away from his friend and leaned against Maya’s sapphire blue Camaro. “You’re adopted?”

“No, no!” Austin waved off the suggestion. “I mean, the woman in my house is … is …an

imposter. She looks like my mom, sounds like my mom. But it isn’t her!”

“So,” Ray asked trying not to sound too sarcastic, “somebody kidnapped your mom and replaced her with a different person who looks exactly like her?”

“I know it sounds crazy,” Austin pleaded. “But she was being totally weird all night. Not acting like herself at all. It is definitely not my mom. I know it.”

“Maybe you should talk to somebody,” Ray suggested quietly. Somebody, he was thinking,

with lots of diplomas on the wall and access to mood altering drugs.

“No,” Austin exclaimed immediately. “The police might be a part of it. We don’t know! We

can’t trust anybody!”

“Oh, boy. Here we go.”

“My fake mom is taking the day off today.” That in itself was unusual. The woman was an insane workaholic in Ray’s opinion. Her law firm specialized in environmental law, which meant they had plenty of cases and didn’t win very often. She practically lived at work.

“I’m going to follow her and see what she does.”

“What? On your bike?”

“Well, I was going to…” Austin started to explain but he was interrupted by the front door slamming.

“Get the fuck away from my car, dweeb!” Ray jumped at the sound of his sister’s voice. She was striding across the driveway wearing wedge sandals, designer jeans, and big, round sunglasses that hid about half of her face. Similarly, about half of her breasts were hidden inside of a tight fitting blouse. The top three buttons were undone revealing the valley of her cleavage and the lacy edges of her black bra. The fourth button was straining mightily to hold the shirt together. She was looking at Ray like he was something foul and sticky that she had just stepped in. On the bright side, the bathroom was available.

Cover Art: Amanda Baker Shakes Her Moneymaker

This is another case when I went the stock photo route (honestly, making my own covers is too much work sometimes). In this book, a young woman improvises a strip tease to make up for forgetting to hire a stripper for her step-brother’s bachelor party. For a story about booty shaking, it’s only natural to have some booty on the cover.

I also really wanted shiny, gold shorty-shorts. For one thing, they’re sexy. For another, the color gold symbolizes expensive. And not always in a tasteful, refined way. Gold is the color of stuff that’s expensive just for the sake of being expensive. Gold is the color of showing off. It’s a “moneymaker” that she’s shaking out there, after all, so it only makes sense that it’s gold plated. I also echoed the shiny, gold fabric behind the title to continue the theme.

Specific requirements like that can be a problem with stock photos, where you typically just have to take what you can get. In this case, however, quite a few people were thinking along the same lines. Shiny, golden butts were quite plentiful. And the quality was right up there, too. There were some very, very fine asses on display.

In fact, I actually stretched this photo to make her about 15% thicker. I wanted more of a “girl next door” look and less of a “freakishly hot ass-model” look. I think it works.

Cover Art: Smokey at My Backdoor

This is one of my favorite covers. It’s just so shiny and vibrant! Of course, most of that is due to the stock photo of the semi, which is awesome. Note that the Peterbilt logo here has been replaced with “Peterbabe.”

The title text uses the same chrome effect as the Power Receiver cover. This text has also been stretched, skewed, and embellished with some lightening bolts that I drew myself. The final product is strikingly similar to the poster for a certain Burt Reynolds movie.

The mudflap girl was drawn by me, based on the original mudflap girl with certain key modifications. That profile was then skewed to match perspective and overlayed on the truck photo in Inkscape. Turns out it’s pretty hard to find an actual truck that has a chick with a dick on the grill (unfortunately).

Interestingly, that mudflap girl graphic actually inspired this story. You see, I originally drew her for a different book cover project. That didn’t work out, but I thought this well-endowed (x2) lady would be perfect on the cover of a story that featured a truck driver who liked it up the ass. That’s how Smokey at My Backdoor was born!

Cover Art: Terminal Case

I originally drew an illustration for this cover myself. It sucked. The drawing wasn’t even up to my own mediocre standards and, unlike a book like Invasion of the Snatch Snatchers, a cartoonish cover illustration did not suit Terminal Case at all.

This story is much more serious than a lot of my other writing. The humor is very dark and cynical and it has some bleak moments. So I dug up a photo of a blond model looking intensely into the camera. She suits the character of Paige very well, I thought. She looks pretty but not gorgeous, intense but not mean, smart but not stuffy. This particular model was also wearing a Native American feathered headdress, which didn’t suit my purposes at all (bug beggars can’t be choosers). I’ve faded out huge chunks of the model’s head as a result.

Cover Art: The Power Receiver

This is a pretty straightforward photo edit. Just take one pic of a extremely muscly dude, add one pic of myself holding a stereo receiver, and viola — the perfect cover for The Power Receiver. The best part is I can tell people I used a photo of myself to make this book cover (even it if is just my hand).

The chrome-look text was designed in Inkscape based on a tutorial I found online. The key is lots of layers. Then a whole lot of high-contrast, periodic gradients. The higher the contrast in your gradient, the “shinier” the result will appear to be.

 

Cover Art: Invasion of the Snatch Snatchers

This was my first book cover. I made the whole thing myself, including the drawing. I’d never done a project that ambitious before. I’m not really an artist, so I basically blundered my way through by trial and error. It took forever. I think I spent as much time on the cover as I did writing the book (that’s not a joke).

But I learned a lot by doing this. If I did it over again, I could probably do a much better job. I like the cartoonish quality of this illustration though. It suits the subject matter.

Cover Art: The Lesbian, the Bitch, and the Bathrobe

This was the second time I attempted a large illustration for a book cover and it went much more smoothly. I learned from my mistakes with the first go-around. Megan (the blond) is tough, edgy, and athletic. I based her off of Australian fitness model Stacey McMahon, Susan Storm from the Fantastic Four, and this girl from my local donut shop with funky hair.

Lily, on the other hand, is soft and voluptuous. I tried to contrast her with Megan in terms of physical build, color, and texture. The bathrobe was a difficult one for me to get right. I wound up just applying a blur filter over and over to give the robe a fuzzy texture. One interesting note: her glasses are based on ones worn by porn star Mia Khalifa.

Originally I planned to draw the title text by hand, but I found this Algerian font and it looked awesome. Originally the text was reddish brown, but that was difficult to read. I changed it to a misty-tan in order to up the contrast.