Creating the Cover Art for "Tiny, Big" -- Yes, you, too, can create bad cover art!

Beginning and end stage images I used to build a book cover, that I'll be referring to in this post.

Laura the Tiny Elf before and after

Gina the Big Elf before and after

I'm not an artist and I know it. But I have developed a set of tricks to let me create stuff that kinda looks like art and fulfills Amazon's rules for cover art, and I thought I'd share it with you because it's fun, at least, to me.

(Note: I use GIMP for my covers. It's an open-source program for creating and editing digital images, basically, the equivalent of Photoshop, only free. Like Photoshop, it has a fairly steep learning curve. I can't honestly say how steep, because I've used it for years and I've stepped in all the cow pies. I do remember spending a lot of time grinding my teeth and wondering what the hell I'd done wrong this time when I was first starting out. However, it is possible (as in “almost certain”) that you are better than me at learning new software and will not grind your teeth down to nubbins, which do not work so well for chewing.

As a marketer of my erotica, I want my cover art to be as raunchy and naked as possible. Amazon, unfortunately, has Standards, and they include No Nudity. Also, strictly for erotica covers, No Butt Crack, No Underboob, No Sideboob, No Happy Trails, And of course, No Nipples and No Genitals. The rules are move relaxed in other categories, probably out of a recognition that if nudity were allowed in erotica, you'd get wall-to-wall nudity on the book covers, whereas with other genres you only occasionally get something like this:

 (A recent cover on r/badscificovers.)

But back to our cover art. Only one of these images was “created” by me, that would be Laura the Tiny. Gina the Big's art I found on Pixabay. I was hoping to find a photo that would work, but came across the Gina image that very nicely matched my idea of what a nine foot tall woman who was very fit might look like. And her costume was very naked, but not entirely naked. Perfect, really, for me.

There were just three things I had to work with to make her work entirely for me. One: that face. It's just wrong. Especially the eyes. Not sure what went wrong, but her eyes are a mess and her jawline is too firm. Her lower face looks like it's just a hairline away from growing a beard. (That's when I realized what the artist's problem was. It wasn't a bad drawing. Red hair, staring eyes, incipient beard: she's French!)

I decided not to do any work there, it would just take too long to fix her face to something more Geena Davis-ish. (Geena Davis is the actress I based the character of Gina on, in terms of voice and mannerisms, plus she's got an athletic build and is tall). Sometimes “Let it be” is your best shot, and the rest of the body is so nice and Big.

Two other problems. I'm sure you spotted one of them: underboob. It was an easy fix. I created a new layer first, because you can adjust transparency on a new layer if you need to, a handy trick as you will soon see. I just borrowed the color from her bra and followed the existing contours of her breast to get the shape. I had initially thought I would have to digitally erase the metal border on the underside of the bra (talk about an underwire!) but when I covered up the border with the red bra color and dialed the transparency on the layer just a little, the the border showed through but was properly colored, looking very much like a seam in the fabric of the bra. Perfect!

If I were a REAL artist I might have created a new metallic border on the underside of the bra, but I'm pretty sure most viewers wouldn't notice and I KNEW that I didn't care. So, no metallic border.

There was one more bit that was needed to comply with Amazon nudity standards, but harder to spot. Amazon wants NO vaginal area on display, and if you'll look carefully at Gina's crotch, there's a bit of flesh between her inner thigh and the edge of the sex cachet she wears. It's not really vaginal area, but I'm not getting my book blocked over some detail on the cover like that. So I went in and added some red to cover that tiny bit of flesh. I doubt anyone would know, because it looks like part of the weird outfit.

All that was left was the background and the hair. I knocked it out using some alpha layer tomfoolery, which meant I didn't have to go in there and cut it out by hand. Only problem was, those wisps of hair that fringe her head didn't knock out perfectly, being wisps. That's OK, I went in there with the digital shears and trimmed them off, making it appear that her hair was styled. Voila! I had my Gina art. Well, French Gina art.

Laura was much tougher, but also more fun. She's based on a Second Life avatar, which meant I went into Second Life, pulled up an avatar, and took photos of her against a black screen to create my art. I also decked her out in a collar and cuffs, but decided to photograph her naked rather than look around for a skimpy bra and panties to put on her. Though I did buy a pair of cheap elf ears for her. Cost me $50 Lindens, which works out to roughly twenty US cents. I'm always willing to spend where it counts!

There are TONS of clothing options for avatars on Second Life, because residents make everything that exists in the game, including the very shape of the land and water itself. Godlike powers, indeed! Most central to the game's economic success is that you can create your own avatar skins, bodies, hair and most of all, clothes, clothes, clothes, clothes, clothes.

Yes, you can be a virtual clothing designer, makeup designer, hair stylist, etc., on Second Life and make money at it, in some cases, serious bank, since Lindens are tradable for US dollars as I pointed out earlier.

… wait … where's everybody gone? Aw, come on, buy my boooooook … Geeze.

Anyway, I could have bought a nice thong and bikini set, but it takes forever to find a skimpy one that really works. They come in two varieties, one that comes as painted-on art and for some reason has terrible jaggies, and one that is beautiful but takes a lot of effort to get it fitting right.

I wanted to get, insofar as possible, a naked look for Laura, and I have finally figured out how to draw lingerie on avatars and make it look right, and make it look naked. I started by taking about 50 photos of Laura naked but for collar, cuffs and shackles, looking for the right pose and the right angle of that pose. Another thing they make in Second Life is animations, and since slavegirls are popular roles in Second Life (because a lot of women enjoy submissive fantasies) there are also a lot of kneeling poses. I wanted one that showed Laura's adoration of Gina, and when I got what I wanted, I did the alpha channel process and got a nice clean cutout, as seen on the left. Notice that in this one, even the wisps of hair came out clean.

The first thing I had to fix was Laura's right breast. It was lumpy and smaller than I wanted. The breasts are built from polyhedrons, and when you enlarge the breasts, the polyhedrons enlarge and become more visible, and I had Laura's breasts pumped up as it was. (There are tools called “sliders” that let you enlarge, shrink and otherwise change body parts at a whim, if you are using the basic Second Life body.)

I wanted Laura to be curvy because she was so small, and if I made her at all slender, she'd look … childlike. And in the erotica genre, that is a third rail: touch it and die. I wanted Laura to be very womanly-looking for that reason, and so I used a circle tool that created a breast-shaped circle to make Laura curvier, and filled it with the appropriate flesh tones just by copying the existing flesh tones over. (Her hips were already nice and round, and it was more subtle work, so I left them as is.)

Before I could go covering up her breasts with clothing, I used the clone tool to place generic flesh tones over the nipples, then used the smear tool to even out the tones so that at the end, her breasts were nipple-free. Yay. I did the same with the bit of genitals and pubic hair that were visible. Very easy work.

Then I created a new layer and used a combination of circle tools and following the existing lines of her body, to create the outline of her top and her panties. I didn't bother making it super-realistic, I just wanted it to look good and emphasize Laura's curviness. That's where the circles came in handy. They make the artwork look polished and smooth, but it's just using the circle tool and making it grow a border, then filling in the border for the appropriate part of the circle in your design. Between the circle tracing and following existing contours, I did very little free-handing, but I'm very pleased about the undies I drew, as they accentuate Laura's curviness further.

Once I had the outlines drawn, I filled them in, with the bra and undies on their own separate layers. I used flat white and it didn't look at all realistic, until I started adjusting the transparency on the layers. Once the overlays were sufficiently transparent, the modeling on the body underneath came through, basically shading the undies for me, and doing it exactly right, without any effort on my part other than adjusting a slider.

When I was through, I had a very nicely modeled, non-naked Laura. After that it was just a bit of touch-up. By far the trickiest part was the eyes, which in the original are looking downward, whereas I wanted Laura looking upward, at Gina. Also, there's a definite goofy look there if you zoom in close. I just copied the corneas, painted over where they'd been with white eyeball color, and flipped them upside down, positioned them as I wanted so that Laura looked up, then drew in some irises to get rid of that dead “doll-eye” look, and added a couple of reflections, just white dots in the irises. I also rounded out Laura's right shoulder, as it was looking a bit lumpy.

 I made the leash the same color as the center of Gina's fist, and made it a simple line running from her hand to the ring on the front of Laura's collar. I kept it as simple as possible, as it wasn't supposed to be a major feature of the artwork, just something to visually symbolize the relationship between Gina and Laura. I used the circle and line tools to make the way the leash hung look natural, once again.

I had found a nice bit of vaguely spooky and magical looking background art and a stone walkway in Second Life, which has sandboxes for that sort of thing, and I pasted Laura and Gina into it. I painted a bit of shadow underneath Laura to anchor her to the background, and that was it. The muted gray color made Gina and Laura really pop from the background, which is what I wanted, two sexy mostly naked women. Hopefully, the cover will help sell the book.

All in all we are talking a good ten, fifteen hours of work for me, if I'd been able to just sit and do it. I spent two and half days at it, two of them weekend days. A real artist could probably have put something better looking together in about an hour. Maybe two at the outside. Hire a pro if you can afford one, but the good ones don't come cheap, and the bad ones, well, some of them make me look good by comparison, and a lot of the bad ones have been known to use copyrighted images for their content. That's a legal spanking!

(Note: “Tiny, Big” is already selling well, and I've just gotten started promoting it. I'm thinking the cover worked.)

"Tiny, Big" An Erotic Fantasy Novella, Is Available on Amazon

(All the links in this post are NSFW to one degree or another. Don't say you weren't warned.)

International Bookstore link to “Tiny, Big”

Amazon Bookstore link to “Tiny, Big”

I'm very proud of the opening line to my new novella “Tiny, Big.” It is “Why would I want my arms and legs cut off? That seems a bit extreme even for me.”

If that doesn't make you want to turn the page, nothing will.

Never fear gentle reader no legs and arms were harmed and the creation of the story. As is often the case with all great works of literature this story was inspired by a porn photo. You can see the photo by following this link. The actresses involved are 5 foot tall Penny Pax and 5 foot 11 inch Dylan Ryan. The image is clearly created to appeal to fans of lesbian macrophilia and microphilia, along with fans of lesbian bondage, lesbian sex, and general perversion.

(Sound of a record scratch)

Wait … what? “What are macrophilia and microphilia?” you almost certainly may ask.

Macrophilia is being sexually attracted to someone who is very tall. Microphilia is being sexually attracted to someone who is very short. Interestingly, there does not appear to be any term for finding images of very large and very short women having sex appealing.

But there is a subreddit for it named http://www.reddit.com/r/samespecies. Wouldn't you know it, a subreddit would exists for a perversion long before it even had a name? r/samespecies is full of images of very short and very tall women standing next to one another, generally just smiling at a camera, sometimes nude, more often clothed, though there ARE occasionally pics of naked women of different size having sex.

I've found that the Your Fantasies Unlimited format works very well with porn images to create short porn stories and novellas. And I'd like to claim that the Dylan Ryan/Penny Pax image alone was responsible for the plot of “Tiny, Big.” And it is a very evocative image, especially expressions on Penny and Dylan's faces – they really know how to act bondage.

But I have to admit, I had another source of inspiration, the work of the Swedish artist known only on Grigbertz. Here's his website with lots of drawings.  Grigbertz's stories almost always have a theme of short women, often elfin and ALWAYS naked and in bondage, generally with a mythical medieval background. Here's a very nice example of Grigbertz's artwork that fits what I've described.

In one of Grigbertz's storylines, women who don't reach a certain height by age 18 (or whatever the age of consent in Sweden is) are enslaved. The women are standard Grigbertz tinies, and they are enslaved by taller men and women, who molest them, much to everyone's great pleasure, including the tinies.

Well say no more. I didn't exactly copy Grigbertz's mythology, because what fun would that be? And in Grigbertz's case, it would be hard because his text is fragmentary and not well developed, based on what I've seen. Being a writer, I tend more toward text, for whatever reason. And I work out my ideas in greater detail. But Grigbertz's skill in communicating his fantasies with a few pencil lines is not to be ignored.

You can read my precis of my story on my Amazon page, but I have to filter it very heavily for Amazon's sake, plus I have to keep it brief. Here's the full story:

In the magical land of Corliandra, human beings are divided into three different body types: Tinies, three to four feet tall, averaging 3'6”, Normies who run five to 6 and a half feet tall, in short, human beings as we know them on Earth, for the most part, and Bigs, who grow to eight to nine feet tall, averaging eight and a half feet tall. Tinies, Normies and Bigs are not distinct species at all, they can interbreed. Tiny mothers can have Big children, Big mothers can have Tiny children, and the same with Normies. It's just a matter of which genes are dominant, with about one in five humans being Tinies, one in five being Bigs, and three in five being Normies.

All three groups get along together fine, because of the interbreeding. Most families are a mix of Tinies, Normie's and Bigs to one extent or another, especially large families.

This, the protagonist Laura is a Tiny, has a Normie brother, a Tiny mother and a Big father. And the protagonist Gina is a Big, with a Normie brother (just a coincidence) and a Big father and a Tiny mother. Both families are happy and healthy and love one another (though Normie brothers can be annoying, whether you are a Big or a Little).

The fact that both Laura and Gina have Tiny mothers and Big fathers is not coincidence: by tradition from time immemorial, Bigs sexually enslave Tinies when they turn 18. It's not an ironclad thing: sometimes Tinies enslave Bigs and sometimes Normies enslave Bigs, etc. etc. But mostly Bigs enslave Tinies, because that's how most Corliandrans are wired. Literally, they are magically/instinctively compelled to do these things, and to love one another afterward. (God, fantasy makes character-building easy. Why do they do it? Magic!)

The excitement of the action in Corliandra depends on Laura and Gina's relationship, what kind of fun sexual things they get up to and how they respond to them. But there's also the Your Fantasies Unlimited action in the real world. It turns out that things that happen in the fantasy world of Corliandra have some effect in the real world, and gives me some fun playing off my real-world characters against their fantasy world counterparts.

I guess what I'm saying is, get this book, or rent it using Kindle Unlimited (for free, in essence). It's one of my best works ever.

In future posts, I want to talk about how the cover was built, and I also want to talk about how I cast the characters to give them their voice and look. In the meantime, here's da blurb:

Laura was by all accounts the feistiest and talkiest Tiny in her village in the magical land of Corliandra. (But she wasn't the tallest, she was just an average Tiny at 3'6” tall.) And Laura was SURE she would never turn into a simpering love slave like most of the other Tinies did when they turned 18. She would never fall for some beautiful nine foot tall Big, because being a Big's love slave was so wrong, even if everyone else, including her Tiny mother and Big father, assured her that it was so very, very right.

But Tinies, Normies and Bigs all wanted Laura as their love slave, because she had a curvaceous body that along with her passionate personality, set lust lights glimmering in their eyes.

Gina was a Big at 8'6” tall, and she was the most accomplished huntress and archer in the village, and also quite beautiful. She loved to listen to Laura talk (Laura was a great and frequent public speaker). She dreamed of the day she would collar Laura and listen to her talk for hours, generally after Laura had used her tongue in other ways. And unknown to Gina, Laura had eyes for her, perhaps because of the grace with which Gina moved, or her knowing half smile that hinted at a tantalizing world inside Gina's shy exterior.

When Gina makes her move on Laura after she turns 18, Laura discovers the magic of love. Finally, Laura know the joys of being a Tiny love slave, and Gina knows the joys of having a Tiny love slave. And these discoveries may Somehow lead Laura and Gina into a whole new world of erotic possibility, of lesbian bondage, public nudity, erotic dance and bondage orgies, which may Change Everything – even in the real world outside Corliandra!

This novelette is just over 21,000 words long, and is Book Two in the “Your Fantasies Unlimited” series.

WARNING: This books is infested with humor, has a pleasant and fun approach to sex and sexuality, and contains graphic sexual content of the sort that those who enjoy graphic sexual content will enjoy. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!