Layering Together the Foreground and Background

Today I completed cleaning up the foreground layer of my book cover image. It took about three days of scrubbing to remove the opaque white background — that’s about three hours. It’s not really that much time — it just seemed longer. I added in a potential background layer just for fun. I’m thinking that the background needs to be toned down, perhaps desaturated, darkened, blurred.

The really good news is that my mind has leapt forward one notch — I’m starting to think about parting with $295 for ten ISBN numbers. That’s going to be an all-in commitment.

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Composite Cover Image for Children's Picture Book

The hardest part of blogging about the same project week after week is coming up with post titles. Every week I have a Al Fresco Art Club title, a Chore Day title, then maybe five titles about the book cover image, or 10 consecutive posts about the ideal aspect ratio for eBook pages, and on and on. It gets repetitive and boring.

Enough of that kind of thinking. Let’s move on the cover page image. I’m reassembling the scattered parts on top of the initial background sketch. So far I’m happy with what I’ve got. Over the last nine months of working on this book I’ve learned to have reasonable expectations. When I look at my pictures, I no longer say, “Wow, that sucks!” because I really like my simple style. I no longer want to draw and paint like anyone else.

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Still Working on the Cover Page, This Time It's Our Hero, Jimmy Jay

Here’s my rendition of Jimmy Jay about to enter the chimney. I can see from the look on his face that he’s a determined bird on a mission. When I combine all parts of the picture into the master image, his mother will be trying to grasp his leg to stop him, and behind her, Jenny Jay will be smiling enigmatically, while behind her will trail the mysterious Argyle Twins, the two suit-wearing mice who can fly without wings.

My next task is to work on a background layer worthy of all of this excitement.