…until they make you bleed.  You have your warning, as this is a head-to-desk moment.

I’ve had a few people ask who did my cover and well, that be my screenshot here.  Brilliant me, I naturally didn’t count on the ‘bleed’ space needed for my forthcoming print version of Dragon Aster: Book I (that would be all those not-so-cool red lines around it all).  It’s gonna need to be rearranged and stretched which isn’t hard in itself, I just hate math.  Period.  If you ever make your own cover via Photoshop or another program, I leave to go back to drawing with some words of wisdom from someone learning it all from trial and error, also known as scratch.

1.  Always make your cover image insanely big.  Unless your machine is older then 3 years, you can’t make it too big.  If you look at mine in the above picture, you can see that I’m still cutting it way too close to visual pixels in the final work.  Cirrus and Sybl there are big enough in actual size to blanket my 13 inch laptop screen a few times.  The checkered canvas they are all roughly pasted on at the moment is 65 inches wide and 45 high.  Forget the screen–I could blanket my kids with this.

2.  Get the brightness bright right off the bat.  This saves kicking yourself in the future.  A good cover is bright.  If you accidently flatten all your layers permanently and it’s dull, a last-minute brightness touch-up might make glow what you don’t want to.

3.  Big fonts win.  With everything digital these days and online, small fonts mean you’re blindsided by potential customers.  Big fonts for the win.

4.  You can never have too many layers.  Seriously.  One for my dragon, one for her dress, one for Sybl, one for each of the lines of font…okay, you get the idea.

5.  A good scanner is your friend.  An old scanner will see you grow old and die before it.

6.  Have enough memory!  By cheese does my machine do the crawl thing when doing this.  On top of that, my hard drive is screaming at me.  I think it’s time to hand the laptop down to the kiddies and upgrade…

7.  And no, that is not my email beside that email icon.  <.< ‘  *jots down note to clean that out one day and maybe find more memory in doing such…*