Making A Cover for “On The Run”

I'm not sure who reads this blog (in contrast to the sister blog: Don't Wait for the Movie!), but I feel guilty about putting all the latest information about the Helen project on Smashwords over there.  In short, I'm publishing the entire Helen story in installments on Smashwords, which is essentially a self-publishing website.

Helen and Lalitha: The Lost Years was put up a couple of weeks ago.  It takes up the story after Helen gets back from ballet camp, (Helen at Ballet Camp), and describes how she meets Lalitha, an important, recurring character.  The book I'm working on now is Helen On the Run: The Lost Years 2, which describes how Erin joins the family, and little James is born.  In the first half of this story, Helen masquerades as a man, a construction worker.  In the second half, Helen is pregnant (well, she's pregnant pretty much the whole time).

When I made the cover, I first had a picture of a guy in a hard hat, and put it in a sort of Southwestern landscape.  But it looked rather dismal; I had put a lot of texture on it, because it looked so plain with just the picture of the gal in the hard hat.  Here is what it looked like at that point:

It is the head of a girl, and the body of a man, but I widened the hips, so that it looked more plausibly a pregnant woman.  But by the time I had finished with the texturing, it looked really gloomy.  People would have thought: she should jolly well be on the run, and she can stay on the run, for all we care!

But I thought we needed a softer image of a pregnant girl, so I added, behind the construction girl, a pregnant woman, lying on the ground.  It now looks like this:

I'm kind of proud of the lettering, which looks like a Wanted poster from the Old West.  Unfortunately, the pregnant woman looks like she's been amputated at the hips, which is really peculiar.  I guess more work is needed...

[To be continued ...]

Kay