HIPGNOSIS.BREATHE. Album Cover Art und Photo Design by Aubrey Powell & Storm Thorgerson Celebrating 50 Years THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON. Exhibition Ludwiggalerie Schloss Oberhausen, Germany, 21. Januar – 20. Mai 2024.
01 Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon, Design Hipgnosis, A. Powell, S. Thorgerson © Pink Floyd Music Ltd. 02 10cc, Look Hear? © Hipgnosis 03 ACDC, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap © Hipgnosis 04 Led Zeppelin, Presence © Hipgnosis 05 Peter Gabriel, Scratch © Peter Gabriel 06 Pink Floyd, Animals © Pink Floyd Music Ltd. 07 Pink Floyd, Arnold Layne © Pink Floyd Music Ltd. 08 Pink Floyd, Belsize Park, Foto Aubrey Powell © Pink Floyd Music Ltd. 09 Pink Floyd, Live at Knebworth 1990 © Pink Floyd Music Ltd. 10 Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here, back sleeve, invisible businessman © Pink Floyd Music Ltd. 11 Rainbow, The Best of Rainbow © Hipgnosis 12 Pretty Things, Savage Eye © Hipgnosis
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Julia is sick of working late. She's sick of being disrespected, and most of all she's sick of her boss. Lance is a burned out, smooth-talking playboy, but he also happens to be the son of the CEO.
When Lance pushes her buttons once too often, Julia is tempted to put him in his place – but is it worth throwing away her career for a moment of satisfaction?
Content:
-F/M
-dom
-degradation
-small penis humiliation
-directed masturbation
-power play
5k words, EPUB and PDF format
Only $3, Releases later tonight! you can go read the first two pages on the shop page!
i've mentioned a couple times now that my editor and the author of roger crenshaw: the dogs at duskfall @mortalityplays is now available for freelance work for people other than me, but i don't think i've made as big of a deal how he's ALSO going to start releasing his own smut shorts on the last friday of every month! he is SUCH a talented writer on top of being an excellent editor and it's my absolute delight to work with him on the cover for his first release. FINALLY i have a great answer when asked "is there anyone else writing smut like you?"
and since this was the first time in a while i went through a cover design process that wasn't just me making one for myself, i thought i would go into how it went!
The Prompt
R/L wanted something that didn't visually describe the characters, because he had deliberately avoided that himself in the text. these characters are archetypes, ideas of characters: a woman who works in an office and her playboy burnout boss. for an erotic fantasy scenario, not going into detail can be ideal, as it allows the reader to project their own fantasies onto the characters. but what does that mean for a cover, when showing off the characters is often the point?
The Thumbnails
it means silhouettes, babie! if you're a reader of romance you've probably seen this approach a few times. silhouettes allow you to give the impression of a character without actually specifying them. HOWEVER! that can only go so far. note the female silhouettes in the left and right thumbnails--one with a pony tail, one with her hair down. these two very minor design elements say completely different things about the character, and pin her design down into something specific. (there is a whole line of feminist thought about this, that there is no such thing as an "unmarked" woman, or rather a woman whose presentation does not say something about her, ie a woman not wearing makeup is not perceived as neutral the way a man not wearing makeup is).
so anyway including her in the cover in full doesn't work for the prompt, because how she wears her hair or how she dresses would say something about her that we don't want to say. thus: we chose the middle design!
a man in a shirt and tie are super archetypal, and """neutral""" enough to not say anything specific about lance, our male protagonist, other than he has a job and is of average size (which are of course not technically truly neutral, but for our purposes, are functional as symbols). and while a long, narrow, leg does still say something about julia, it is abstracted enough to simply represent the concept of "woman" without projecting an overall image of her in the reader's head. she has a leg, and she wears high heels. that's all you get!
The Sketch
now we can move on to the sketch stage! this is the point at which the palette and text are figured out. i tried a few fonts before landing on one that had the retro paperback all-caps feel that i liked, and i used what i believe to have been a risograph print texture from retrosupply.
we went with the text up top rather than at the bottom, because it lends weight to the shoe and balances out the blacks in the pants. it also allows the figure to take up more of the cover, which is ideal. honestly, not a whole lot to say about this bit that i didn't cover in thumbnails: which is the point of doing thumbnails in the first place!
The Finish
well you can just scroll up to see that one. the final colors ended up a little less saturated, a little cooler, to bring it home to the retro paperback look i was going for and tie the colors together. i'm very pleased with it and had a lot of fun. cover design is one of my favorite parts of putting out books, and it was especially fun working with someone else to bring their vision to life.
anyway, you should go buy this book! it's only three dollars and i want to make more covers for these! your purchases would prove that i am a very good investment as a cover artist >:)
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So excited to be doing the new cover for Smut Peddler’s 10th anniversary reissue over at @ironcircuscomics! I am easily swayed by Gibson Girl hair and the chance to do some hand-lettering 👀
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...Noodling around with some tests of lighting profiles in Daz Studio, while background-considering the gonna-happen-soon business of recovering the Tale of the Five trilogy for both Ebooks Direct and Amazon. ...This project's been hanging fire for a while, but there's no point in putting it off any longer, even though it'll be a lot of work. Cover styles have changed a lot in the last few years, so it's time these had covers that'll reflect that.
What this means for me is producing four sets of covers, all in different styles, so I can do A/B testing on them at the 'Zon. (Meaning that for four different week-long periods, you publish the books in each of the separate formats and see which two get the best results in terms of sales. Then you give each of the two winners another two-week period and see how those results behave.)
The guide to the various currently-popular cover styles I've been using is this one. (Which isn't a bad one at all; but since the people publishing this page want you to hire them for this kind of work, that's sort of to be expected). Numbers 1, 4 and 9 on their list are the ones that appeal to me or are appropriate. The others either strike me as bad choices for these books, or just annoy me. (#2 in particular. I've seen it well executed, but I've started getting kind of sick of seeing it.)
Meanwhile, for your amusement, here are my current sketches... just to disabuse you of any ideas that they look in any way professional at this point. :) Two versions of the minimalist/object oriented style, and one each of the 3D modeling and the double exposure/burnthrough variant. We'll see what comes out the other end of the process in a month or so. (In fact I may put up a poll here with one book in four versions, and see what the local readership thinks.)
...Meanwhile as regards the topmost image (currently titled "This Is Not A Good Time"): I live in hope that someday I'll get Héalhra's damn mane under control. Daz's dForce utility is very good at handling some material textures and making them respond more like gravity had some actual effect on them. But in this case it's been like fighting ineffectively with a bad perm. (eyeroll) (Also, who here was it that put a pink Hello Kitty bow on him last time I posted an image of him fluffed up like this? It left me giggling for days and now I can't find it...) :)
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