Epic Fail

Yup, in case you were wondering, I epically failed my exam. The good part about it is... it was darn hard. So I don't feel like an idiot for failing (especially since I was 0.3 points away from getting in).

What happened is this - the first half of the test went smoothly with minimal mistakes from my part. The third part was evil - stuff we did not do in school. The fourth part was also evil - I got most of that one right, only we had multiple choice, and I either had too many or too little choices. So... yup, I failed.

As you can see, I'm not exactly upset about it, because I realized that the people who organize this exams have other plans in mind (first session - really hard exam - the spots are not filled. Second session = spots filled + new entry fees = more cash for them). And it's just pathetic. I don't think I want to join a system like that. So, I'm concentrating on getting a job right now. Fortunately, a friend is helping out. :)

But enough about that. That's depressing. Let's concentrate on what I did with my free time. I cooked up my first acceptable cover for Hunters. I had tried to cook something like that before, but I'm a bit of an amateur and it takes a little while to get the hang of photoshop and figure out where to go for stock photos.

So... here's what I have:

Pathetic first attempt

I did this before I had finished with the exam madness. It took little time and the main thing I learned was how to handle text. As you may see it's too simple and too... colorful. And the text in itself kinda sucks






So I went ahead, did a little research, poked my illegal copy photoshop for about an hour and came up with this:

Second attempt. Pathetic?

Now, I personally like this a lot more. I'm not sure it's the best cover to grace the Internet (okay, I know it's not), but, for one thing, it's smaller (since I made it the exact book size) and I actually put more elements except for one picture and text together (it's two pictures with some editing to both of them).

It has a good level of detail to it. For example, at the bottom of the cover, in the darkness of the chick's hair, there's a tiny village in the moonlight - which actually is part of the setting at some point.
And I made the chick's eyes green, though it's not obvious. Technically, Rachel has orange hair, but all hair looks black in the night, so I could hardly make it orange and then post it on the night background. That would've looked freaky.


So, yes, this is what I have so far. I'm practicing just in case I decide to selfpublish this. Which I'm not sure about yet. And I will attempt another 2 versions of this. I'll keep you posted.

Hope you guys are doing well :)