Poking at the horror cover some more. Thank you all for the feedback (I think I gotta backburner the garden one for a bit–I’ve hit the point where I’ve stared at it for so long that it no longer has any visual meaning.)
On this one, I discovered that it got a little less saturated in my posting of it, so here is another version–bumped up the saturation on the colors, lowered the brightness on the title, made the blurb bolder, and bumped up the kerning between the letters by about ten points (not sure if anyone can tell…)
This feels almost too easy–dark woods, slap title on, call it a day. I suspect I may have gotten lucky that I have a very creepy driveway and a lot of photoshop actions at my disposal, but still, shouldn’t there be some way that I can do ten times as much work and make it ten percent better? (Pardon, my Catholic is showing…)
And then I start thinking that maybe there’s a certain sort of cover where any photo you take of anything is creepy if you flatten it out and make it dark enough and then put a particular sort of font on it and what if I could make a supernatural horror cover out of anything, I could wander around taking photos of pigeons and my long-stuffering barista and the recycling bins behind the coffee shop–“RECYCLING: TERROR COMES BACK OVER AND OVER AGAIN!”–and go MAD WITH POWER and then I need to go lie down for a minute with a damp cloth over my eyes.
Reduce, Reanimate, Recycle!