I created this book cover design for author C.J. Kavanaugh. She has great pans for her upcoming book series the Code Breakers Club (CBC).
I’ve also been working on more Fractured Tales. Look forward to the announcement of the next title!
Check out the author’s website in this link.
In case anyone was wondering, with the author’s full knowledge I did use an AI image as a reference point for the attic background. But when illustrating it I reduced the number of buttresses and the amount of clutter so it wouldn’t look busy and distract from the foreground characters and magic mirror.
The girl character design was created first and feedback was incorporated into the boy design. I flat-shaded the characters intending to blend them into the background after that was done. But the author liked the characters so much that I ended up doing the reverse by making the background match the characters. This process was expedited by Photoshop neural filters.
The mirror design was based on combining 2 real mirrors available on Amazon. The cBc logo is a rasterized font that was shaded. The glass shard in the magnifying glass was originally being held by the boy character in his right hand (hence why his fist is clenched).
The werewolf shadow was initially AI-generated to get the shape. Then I flattened it, blurred it, stretched it out over the kids, and then deleted the parts that didn’t fall on the kids’ backs.
All in all, this was AI-assisted work, but I selectively used AI tools to save some time while the end product was 0% AI-generated.