Who is that girl?

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Well, actually it's one of my identical twin daughters. But, the face has been changed to protect the innocent. But seriously, it represents a woman of The Tribe. Originally I had anticipated it would be Kelsey the Hawk, the main female character in the book, and if you like, that's who it is. Only thing is, Kelsey would really have to be a bigger stronger woman to have the role she plays in the book. Why all this compromise? Well, money. This being the first book I have had published, I didn't anticipate that the publisher would decline to do the cover I wanted. The actual cover they did looks like the small image to the right. When I found all this out, it was too late to do the cover myself. But, I wasn't satisfied, so I set about doing the cover anyway.

Update as of 2/4/03. The publisher has agreed to use the new cover on all future printings. So if you have one that looks like this, it could become a collector's item.

How was it done? First I had to get a fast enough computer to be able to handle a 45 megabyte file in Adobe Photoshop(tm) without going out to lunch every time I zoomed the image. So I consulted another of my children, my oldest son, Dan, who set me on the trail of a site called mwave.com. There I got an AMD Athalon(tm) XP 1600+ bare bones system with 512 megs of RAM and a 60 Gigabyte hard drive. I put it all together and ordered a Wacom graphics tablet which came with Photoshop LE bundled. I used a monitor and keyboard I already had. The whole thing cost a little over $500. I recently installed a 45x CDR/W burner I got on special for $19.95 after rebates. Amazing! So much for the digital part.

Next, I got together with my twins (Diana and Fiona 14 years old) and we went around to fabric stores looking for imitation fur to make a costume out of. The result is what you see in the picture. The fox fur around the hood is real. By luck, we happened to be in line behind a very nice lady at the fabric store who, it turned out, had a taxidermy business with her husband not far from our little town. When I told her what we were up to, she very kindly offered to look and see what furs she might have lying around that might do. That very evening she called and said she had two red fox furs that hadn't turned out well enough in tanning for normal use and that she'd give them to me. What a nice thing to do! I'll now continue this below the big picture, so scroll down.

So, we set about sewing a costume to fit my girls. I did the sewing using patterns we got at the fabric store (real men DO sew!), and they hand laced the seams with hemp twine. You can see the lacing in the picture above. I made the belts out of old leather belts obtained from the local Goodwill store (and drowned in neatsfoot oil to soften them), and the scabbards from brown naugahyde. The sword and dagger were originally just wood, and I drew over the sword handle in the computer.

The rifle in the book is a thing I invented, see The rifle in the picture if you are interested. For the picture I used a British Short Magazine Lee Enfield bold action infantry rifle (SMLE it's called by those in the know). This is a design that's been around since before World War I, and it is very close to what one would manufacture in the world of the book. It is a rifle you can bet your life on, and many men have. The cartridge belt I also made from black naugahyde. The actual cartridges are .45-70 Government, a cartridge that originated in the mid 1800's. It is the bullet our ancestors used to wipe out the buffalo, (sad to say) and it was originally a black powder cartridge, again, close to what the people in the book could hope to make under the circumstances..

When it was all ready, I set up a blue fabric drape, and we took pictures. Two of these are shown below.

To the left is one of Diana. To the right is Fiona. These I scanned from prints. You'll notice that they are of much lesser clarity than the one I actually used for the cover. This is because when I had selected the photographs for the cover, I sent them out and had them put on Kodak Photo CD. You will have a hard time beating this format with anything you can afford to own, and it's not particularly expensive. Mind you I'm talking about Kodak Photo CD, not Kodak Picture CD which has much less resolution and would never do for this kind of project. The choice of the photo for the actual cover had entirely to do with the stance and angle and things like that, since as you can see, the face was overdrawn in the computer. Thank you girls, now you're famous.

The next step was to find a suitable background and take photographs of that. There is a spot right in our town I have always liked, and for once, luck was with us, it was snowing! Scroll down.

Above we have the background layer from the actual cover (downsized of course). This was taken on my old Minolta 35 mm. SLR with a standard 50 mm. lens using Kodak Gold 200 film, as were the pictures of my twins. You don't need a Hasselblad. Scroll down.

Above we have the figure separated from the blue background. This was done by first selecting the blue with Photoshop's sponge tool and clearing it, and then going around the edges at a high level of magnification (zoomed way in) and manually erasing the traces of blue that were left. Then it was copied and pasted onto a layer in Photoshop in front of the background. Scroll down.

This is what I painted over Fiona's face (see the face on the pic of the figure above) to make the final face. Strange huh? The sword handle is also painted on this layer as are all other minor fixes such as the snow around the feet that makes it look natural. Without the snow painted up over the edges of the feet it looked wrong.

So, my advise is don't assume your publisher will make the cover you want. Get started early, because you will need time to do a project like this. The actual image that makes this cover is 2048 X 3072 pixels. The size of this file is 41.339 megabytes. If you try to do a thing like this on an older machine, you'll think it's crashed every time you do anything, because it'll take forever.

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