Bad Cover Art…Redesigned: There Will Be Dragons

Welcome to Bad Cover Art…Redesigned! Where I bring you the most horrible of all cover art I can find on the world wide web and try to come up with an alternative (that I hope is better).

This week I bring you: There Will Be Dragons by John Ringo

According to goodreads, There Will Be Dragons is set in a paradise world. There is no war, disease, or ill-timed death (I’m not sure what that means…is there such a thing as well-timed death?) Everything then falls apart when the powers that be decide they no longer like each other and go to war. Problem is, no one knows how to survive a war. Everything somehow ends up in the lap of once smith and now unassuming historian Edmund Talbot. However…a smith is not all he used to be and his enemies soon find that out (Colour me intrigued).

I now bring to you There Will Be Dragons…Redesigned!

Thoughts – 

I know, I know. There’s a spaceship in the original cover (no really…there totally is…see that little speck?) and what did I do? I made an old fashioned cover again. I broke the genre again. But you accuse me too soon! The author himself admits that this is a Science Fiction/Fantasy book AND the main character is a historian AND a smith AND the original cover has a Fantasy vibe. I think I had full right to utilise those aspects and create the above cover. Plus I think the cover has a feel of a historic document you might find but one that doesn’t necessarily feel like it’s from our history but is history for people in the future (if you understood that train of thought I congratulate you).

So thinking things. This is what you want from a thoughts section, right? Basically I saw the original cover, laughed for a little while and then obviously could only think about one thing, dragons. I delved into Deviantart, looking for an awesome Dragon brush set and found the above. As usual I wanted to do something really simple. I really like covers with two or three colours that use block colours. There’s something very beautiful, mysterious and captivating about simplistic covers.

After I found the brushes I searched for a nice texture and found the above one, which is actually meant to be a tarot card base. I’m a sucker for parchmenty, old textures (as you may have noticed) and I just got ideas. So keeping with the idea of only a few colours I decided to keep the font the same colour as the border and find a simple font. I plopped the dragon on but it still felt a little empty so I decided to use some text brushes I downloaded for the previous cover and I thought that these ones looked old but futuristic at the same time (I have no idea what those symbols mean. Hopefully I won’t summon some demonic internet presence).

I like this new cover. Yes perhaps I should have put a figure/person on the front since Edmund Talbot appears to be central to the plot but unless Edmund Talbot is actually a tall, large breasted, bow wielding woman (or a dragon) then I don’t think they originally minded that much that he didn’t feature on the cover.

Process – 

Step 1 – Cut down the original texture to fit what I needed

Step 2 – Placed Dragon on the front and gave it a slight outer glow in blending options to give it a bit of a lift

Step 3 – Found font and placed at top. Also gave this an outer glow.

Step 4 – Added text to sides. Played with placement a little.

Step 5 – Added some stains for ageing

Step 6 – Added author name

Elements – 

Main Font – Subway Novella

Author Font – Supernatural Knight

Texture

Dragon

Text

Stains

Thanks for looking and let me know what you think!