Cover Design # 3: Glass Sword by Victoria Aveyard

Recently I had an idea. I thought to myself, what if I could choose an alternative to some of these covers that I've seen about. As my first point of call in a bookshop, I like covers to be able to stand out and make me want to read the story inside. Sadly not all covers can be amazing. I'm not a huge fan of face covers as many of you know, and sometimes the initial design of a cover doesn't really tell me anything about the story...

So, this is going to be a prominent feature on my blog, depending if I have enough time/ can be motivated enough. I am going to be redesigning current covers of books. Now these will most likely be books that I really admire and enjoy looking at but there will be a few covers that I wish I could do over - however these will be clearly stated.

Today, I have one redesigned book cover for you guys: Glass Sword by Victoria Aveyard. Below is what the actual cover looks like. All of my designs below were based on the cover for Red Queen, prior to the release of Glass Sword's cover being revealed.

GLASS SWORD BY VICTORIA AVEYARD (RED QUEEN #2)

I have to state that I openly loved the first novel 'Red Queen.' It's probably been one of my favourites of the year. I loved the world building, the characters, the suspense ect. It was amazing. Another beautiful thing about this book is the cover. It's absolutely stunning. I know that Glass Sword is going to have a very similar look about it and I tried to capture this in my designs. 

For the first design I knew I wanted a sword made of glass - now this proved to be quite difficult unless I used one out of a video game. Luckily I finally found one that I was happy with, even if it looks more like a small dagger! When designing how the sword was going to look, I knew I wanted to play with the blood effect that had been a very prominent feature on the cover of the previous book. It stands out so well, so I decided to edit some dripping blood onto the sword. At first I was proud of it, but unfortunately this pride was not to last, I thought it looked slightly tacky. Now I'm the first to admit that I'm no artist/ graphic designer. This is just a fun little project for myself, but even I want to try and get it as perfect as I can.

On the second design I scrapped the dripping blood and went more for an effect of the blood staining elements of the glass blade and it giving a shimmering type of effect to it. After much deliberation I decided that this worked a lot better than the previous design and I was overall very happy with it. This is the final design for me and I will be interested to see how it compares to the official cover that gets released tomorrow! However, I thought I would include my last attempt at a cover where I wanted to bring back the dripping blood elements that worked well on the first cover.

As you can see, I've incorporated the blood into the background and have faded it quite dramatically. Although it's barely noticeable I still feel it adds a real 'wow' factor to the cover and I think it contrasts quite nicely with the rest of the covers elements. I really enjoyed making up this cover and I think it really gives off the tone of the books. To read my full spoiler review of the first book 'Red Queen' click here.

So there we go guys, there is the book cover redesign for you to oggle and discuss about. Please note I am in no way stating that I am professional, because frankly because they are just images from google, some of them have turned out horrific. This is a fun project, I'm not being serious about any of these. Let me know down in the comments which covers you think I should do next and perhaps I'll attempt them! Until next time.