Fire & Ice: Empath Chronicles by Selina Fenech

Today's Giveaways:

Heidi@Rainy Day Ramblings: Michelle Rowen: Wicked Kiss
Pragya@Reviewing Shelf: Crimson Footprints by Shewanda Pugh

As for my lovely post, today I am featuring a series that I adore. The Empath Chronicles by Selina Fenech. Besides a talented author she designs her own covers too. So, she is here today to talk about the designing process of one of her covers.

Thanks to Veronica for inviting me to guest post on her blog. I’m an author of young adult stories. I’m also an artist and designer, so I design my own covers, and sometimes even illustrate my novels.

Veronica asked me to share the process of one of my cover designs, so here is the most recent cover I designed for the next installment in my young adult paranormal series, the Empath Chronicles.

I stumbled across the perfect photo for the cover of Emotionally Unstable on a designers pre-made covers site, so I bought their premade cover just to get the photo. The models and pose were just what I wanted so I couldn't resist getting to work on this cover design!
  Once I had the file to work with from the designer, I removed their text and enlarged the photo so it filled the space better. Because this is part of a series I want the covers to be similar, and none of the other covers so far show the characters faces, so I push the faces up off the top of the cover a bit.   
I already have the title text design ready to go because it will also match the other covers in the series. The glow around the title text was created by doing a radial blur on a copy of the text, which was placed behind the main text (which has an outer glow effect applied), and then a swirly light stock photo was overlaid over the top.
Now it’s time to go crazy with colour! The idea behind the Empath Chronicles series is that there are people, Empaths, who have the power to feed on other’s emotions to give themselves superpowers. There are also people with the ability to close off their emotions, and block an Empath’s powers. On the cover we have both an Empath, and a Blocker, and I want the colours to reflect their clashing powers. So I’ve overlaid a gradient of blue through to red across the photo.
I use some stock photos of swirling smoke and overlay them over the photo as well, to create a sense of movement, like energy flowing into the characters.
My main character, Livvy, had some wacky stuff happen with her powers in the first book, Emotionally Charged. Emotionally Unstable will deal with the issues relating to her, well,unstable powers! I wanted to ramp up the energy on the image of her on the cover. I found a great photo of spraying sparks which I add over the model, and also add in some strands of hair blowing to give the image more movement. Then I think I’m about done! What do you think of the final cover design?
Emotionally Unstable is some time away while I work on releasing my next Memory’s Wake book. The first book in the Empath Chronicles series (Emotionally Charged) and a short story about one of the characters (Emotionally Scarred) are both available now on Amazon.

I love to see how other people work one their covers. And this series covers are all pretty awesome. Take a look and read my reviews to find out more about the books. Also click the images for the Goodreads page.

My Review of Emotionally Scarred

My Review of Emotionally Charged

The Giveaway

Selina is offering one of you a signed copy of Emotionally Charged.

US only

a Rafflecopter giveaway