162: Book Cover: Motor City Boys

I’ve got another book cover design to share this week!

Bob, the guy who wrote the last book I designed the cover for, shared my info with a friend, and soon enough I had another job.

The book is Motor City Boys and it’s written by Raymond Wlodkowski. It’s set in Detroit in the ’50s, and tells the story of 5 close friends.

Raymond knew he wanted to feature a car in some way, and I had a fun time figuring out interesting ways of incorporating that element and the 5 boys.

We ended up going with this ’56 Chevy with the main characters reflected in the chrome.

On the back, I continued the car around, and cleared some room in the door for a summary and author bio.

I tried to capture the descriptions of the boys from the book in the silhouettes, but leave enough to the imagination so the reader can fill in his/her own images.

The entire cover is basically an illustration I made in Photoshop. It was really fun to get back to realistic painting, even if it was digital. That was something I hadn’t done in a while.

Shiny chrome is both hard and easy to paint. In some places I just made up stuff and it looks fine, but other places took so many reference photos and retries to look convincing.

Raymond delivered my copy of the book earlier this week, so I was able to finally stop holding my breath. I’m never quite sure how it’s going to look until I see the final product, because so much depends on the printing. The best I can do is set up the file the right way, and hope the printer knows what he/she is doing. It looks great.

Motor City Boys is available on Amazon, and once again, I got a mention for the cover design inside the book! Thanks, Raymond!

See you next week!