a asked Penny Reid:

I am in cover lust with your new upcoming series the Winston Brothers!! This series sounds amazing and the covers are awesome! Did you design them yourself, if so how? Or did you have them designed by a company? Where did you get the idea for this series? :)

Penny Reid First, thank you!! :-D
To your questions:
1) I designed the covers myself. I knew I wanted them to be weird...
2) I used photoshop to create the covers. First I took a graphic purchased from shutterstock of a beard + hair combo; then I ran the graphic through an online "cross stitch pattern generator (which gave me a graph representation of the graphic). Then I created a layer with the cross stitch graph and used a specially created "x" brush to fill in all the squares on the pattern (but on a new layer). The font is a cross stitch font I found on the interwebs for free. The little designs around the main beard pictures were improvised. The background (cross-stitch fabric) is a texture created in photoshop. I then added bevel-emboss to give it a 3-D appearance.
3) The idea for the series came from my 4th book in the Knitting in the City series, Beauty and the Mustache. The main character has 6 bearded brothers. The Winston Brothers series is a spinoff of Beauty and the Mustache and each book will center around one of the brothers.
4) Side notes: I'm having the covers turned into actual cross stitch patterns/kits for the book releases.
I hope this helps. :-)
Best, Penny

flag