My cover artist and dear friend Alessandro Fiorini has started a new exciting career, and I know it is going to be hard to replace him. Therefore, in case I won’t find his replacement soon enough, in the last two months, I have tried to learn how to use Expression Design 4 and Gimp to create book covers. Not an easy task, but I have been busy working on it every day. As I wrote in a different post, I wasn’t happy with Elios’s cover. I didn’t like the model’s face and the overall palette. I worked on the cover Alessandro had created for me, using Painter to tinker with the image, but the result wasn’t of my satisfaction. At that point, I was ready to publish the book, but Alessandro was in the middle of his transition to the new job, so I couldn’t ask him to remake the cover and I uploaded the image anyway. Meanwhile, I started a new cover from scratch, using Gimp, Expression design 4, Paint.NET, and Painter. Yesterday, helped by my patient husband, I finally reached a level I could be happy with. And if only Amazon would upload the new covers, I would be happier still.

Those below are the old covers—which, much to my chagrin, at the moment are still displayed on the Amazon page. Among other changes, I had to decide on a different typeface because Trajan Pro, the one Alessandro originally used on Photoshop, didn’t look the same on Expression Design 4. Also, I worked with a different Etruscan alphabet for Gaia’s cover because I couldn’t find the one Alessandro used.