Friday Flourish: City of Shadows

Happy Friday Everyone!

It's a two-Flourish kind of week this week, and today I have a cover I've been sitting on for a little while now and it's nearly killed me. I'm absolutely that person who can't keep a gift-related secret–so excited to show it to whomever it's for that I can't buy any gifts until basically the day I'm allowed to give them. Otherwise it's a debacle of excitement, impatience, and a big reveal at the completely wrong time.

Trying to keep quiet about about the cover for the sequel to last year's City of Fae by Pippa DaCosta was test of the strength of my will, but I managed to keep everything under wraps until I was given the green light to share. City of Fae is one of my favorite covers I've done, so nothing made me happier than teaming up with Editor and Art Director Meredith Rich at Bloomsbury Spark and author Pippa DaCosta once again to see if we could top what we created for book one. I think we did, and hopefully you guys do too!

As I did with City of Fae, I'm planning on doing a cover evolution post for this new cover as well, so I'll go into more detail about our design process then. For now, a little reminder of City of Fae:

And here is City of Shadows, releasing July 7th from Bloomsbury Spark!

Alina knows she is not real – the fae queen spun an evil web to create her – but she wants more than to spend her days feeding off humans' energy to survive. She isn't content to lose herself in the dangerously attractive Reign. She wants a life of her own making.

Desperate to help the man who saved her life, Alina vows to find his missing sister. Alina is convinced that the general of the Fae Authority plays a part in her disappearance. She infiltrates the organisation and gets close to their strongest fighter. But while Samuel's tormented soul and masterful touch stirs in Alina a feeling of being human again, her loyalty to Reign makes her Samuel's enemy. Who should she trust?

This New Adult urban fantasy is packed with action and suspense and will have you yearning for more forbidden fae romance.

Alina knows she is not real – the fae queen spun an evil web to create her – but she wants more than to spend her days feeding off humans' energy to survive. She isn't content to lose herself in the dangerously attractive Reign. She wants a life of her own making.

Desperate to help the man who saved her life, Alina vows to find his missing sister. Alina is convinced that the general of the Fae Authority plays a part in her disappearance. She infiltrates the organisation and gets close to their strongest fighter. But while Samuel's tormented soul and masterful touch stirs in Alina a feeling of being human again, her loyalty to Reign makes her Samuel's enemy. Who should she trust?

This New Adult urban fantasy is packed with action and suspense and will have you yearning for more forbidden fae romance. - See more at: http://bloomsbury.com/us/city-of-shadows-9781408879733/#sthash.69Nu0Ky9.dpuf

Find City of Shadows:

Bloomsbury Spark • Amazon • Goodreads

Alina knows she is not real – the fae queen spun an evil web to create her – but she wants more than to spend her days feeding off humans' energy to survive. She isn't content to lose herself in the dangerously attractive Reign. She wants a life of her own making.

Desperate to help the man who saved her life, Alina vows to find his missing sister. Alina is convinced that the general of the Fae Authority plays a part in her disappearance. She infiltrates the organisation and gets close to their strongest fighter. But while Samuel's tormented soul and masterful touch stirs in Alina a feeling of being human again, her loyalty to Reign makes her Samuel's enemy. Who should she trust?

This New Adult urban fantasy is packed with action and suspense and will have you yearning for more forbidden fae romance. - See more at: http://bloomsbury.com/us/city-of-shadows-9781408879733/#sthash.69Nu0Ky9.dpuf

Cover Evolution: City of Fae

I'm hugely excited and honored today to be a part of the blog tour for Pippa DaCosta's paranormal new adult novel, City of Fae. As many of you already know, I had the pleasure of working with both Pippa and Meredith of Bloomsbury Spark on this cover, so I thought it might be fun to do a little something different for my tour stop and give you guys a behind-the-scenes look at how this cover evolved over the course of the design process.

This was the original raw image. What first struck me about it was the old-world feel to the background city and pavement, and the very eerie quality to the mist as it swirled around the bold girl in red. I instantly pictured this image with London behind her as she stood strong against whatever paranormal creepiness might be hiding in the fog.

The initial critique of this image, while positive overall, raised questions about the model's facial expression. Her downcast eyes seemed too passive for Alina, so my first order of business involved finding a fiercer face for our heroine. Luckily for me, there were a series of shots of this same model available, so with a few small tweaks to color, I was able to give her a new look with relative ease.

After adding London to the background and making some color adjustments to help the cover pop, I ended up with this:

As you can see, I also made a small tweak to the garment wrapping around her shoulders, bringing the fabric in a little closer to her body on the left so as to add a special effect with a spiderweb later. The concept for this cover involved a disintegration effect, with Alina's body gradually dissolving into spiderwebs (to find out why that fits this story so well, you'll just have to read! ;-). I knew in order to achieve this effect, I had to build Alina's dress up and out, adding volume first so I could then subtract in places once I had more material to work with:

This is a very rough approximation of the final gown, you can see the new sections of fabric aren't quite blended into the original dress as of yet. In addition to building the bottom of her gown, I also had to create a large chunk of pavement to cover Alina's feet, otherwise the bottom hem of her original skirt would have been visible through the web.

The dress/web disintegration effect was done with a series of masks in Photoshop, adding pieces of the web in some areas and essentially deleting sections of web from the dress in others. This was a tedious process with a great deal of trial and error, and though I emerged from this round of proofs temporarily blinded from staring at my screen for so long, I think the final effect was worth it!

At this point the design was nearly finished, with only a few small tweaks remaining. I added some colored smoke and a slight purple glow around her body to give the cover a more ominous and paranormal feel:

The final steps included adding the small web detail on her shoulder where I'd removed the fabric before and incorporating the type. I knew I wanted a typeface that was elegant and sophisticated, befitting the regal quality of her dress, but I also knew the tunnels underneath the city played a role in the story, so I wanted to make sure the type had a grittiness to it as well. I made a few small adjustments to the letter shapes themselves and worked in a subtle texture, and then with the addition of the Bloomsbury Spark logo, a few extra smoke trails weaving around the title, and Pippa's name, we had our final cover!

CITY OF FAE

From the moment Alina touches London's hottest fae superstar, breaking one of the laws founded to protect all of her kind, her fate – and the fae – close in.

Below ground, the fae High Queen plots to claim the city as her own and places her pawns, ready for the battle to come. A battle she cannot lose, but for one small problem – Alina. There are four ancient keepers powerful enough to keep the queen in her prison. Three are dead. One remains … And to fight back, Alina risks sacrificing everything she has come to love.

This New Adult urban fantasy is packed with action and suspense and will have you yearning for more forbidden fae romance.

Amazon • Goodreads • Bloomsbury Spark • Official Website 

Find Pippa:

Website • Facebook • Twitter 

Be sure and check out the previous stops on the tour for more interviews, guest posts and City of Fae awesomeness!

• Monday 11th May – ANZ, Jeann, http://www.happyindulgencebooks.com
• Tuesday 12th May – ANZ, Chelsea, www.booknerdigans.com    
• Wednesday 13th May – UK, Jenny Davies, Wondrous Reads
• Thursday 14^th May – UK Katie Halliday, KitKats Can Read
• Monday 18^th May – US, Sarah  http://allthingsuf.com/
• Tuesday 19^th May – US, Jenny http://supernaturalsnark.blogspot.com/

Review: The Darkest Part of the Forest

THE DARKEST PART OF THE FOREST
Holly Black
Paranormal Young Adult
336 pages
Little, Brown
Available January 13th
Source: BEA

THE STORY (from Goodreads)
Children can have a cruel, absolute sense of justice. Children can kill a monster and feel quite proud of themselves. A girl can look at her brother and believe they’re destined to be a knight and a bard who battle evil. She can believe she’s found the thing she’s been made for.

Hazel lives with her brother, Ben, in the strange town of Fairfold where humans and fae exist side by side. The faeries’ seemingly harmless magic attracts tourists, but Hazel knows how dangerous they can be, and she knows how to stop them. Or she did, once.

At the center of it all, there is a glass coffin in the woods. It rests right on the ground and in it sleeps a boy with horns on his head and ears as pointed as knives. Hazel and Ben were both in love with him as children. The boy has slept there for generations, never waking.

Until one day, he does…

As the world turns upside down, Hazel tries to remember her years pretending to be a knight. But swept up in new love, shifting loyalties, and the fresh sting of betrayal, will it be enough?

MY THOUGHTS
The Darkest Part of the Forest is an odd sort of tale, one of those stories with a combination of elements that leaves us not entirely certain of how we feel when we reach the last page. There’s a lot to like about the world and characters Ms. Black has created, but there’s a certain unusualness–an otherness, for lack of a better word–that is both a highlight and a drawback as events unfold. There are layers upon layers to both Hazel and Ben, their relationship with one another, as well as with their parents and their respective love interests, dotted with sore spots we can’t help but want to–a little sadistically–poke to see if the resulting pain produces answers to questions we didn’t even realize we’d asked.

Hazel and her brother Ben are intriguingly protective of one another, but at the same time highly competitive in a quiet, passive way, often hiding selfish motivations inside words or actions that otherwise appear supportive. It’s not as though they’re unlikable or vindictive however, it’s more that they have a gritty and darkly beautiful relationship with more facets to it than we have time to admire in three hundred pages. While a connection to either of them isn’t overly strong, there’s still something captivating about each of them individually as well as a brother/sister pair, and even long after we’ve finished reading we’re not entirely sure how to put our feelings for them into words.

The two separate romances for Hazel and Ben aren’t quite as fully developed as lovers of romance like myself might wish, but as with Hazel and Ben themselves, there are layers to their loves we know are there but can’t quite see. Overall, The Darkest Part of the Forest is captivating in that it takes us to a place we’re not all that sure we’re comfortable being but don’t necessarily want to escape before doing a little digging to see what we can find. This is the first story I’ve read by Ms. Black, and I look forward to reading much, much more.

Rating: 3.5/5

Find Holly:

Website • Facebook • Twitter • Goodreads • Amazon 

This book was sent to me by the publisher free of charge for the purpose of a review. 

I received no other compensation and the above is my honest opinion.