twisted fairy tale

The Beast Series has a new cover (finally)! This one was really difficult to do, partly because the story is so close to my heart, and partly because it has been done so many times, it’s almost impossible to make it look original. I must have done at least 15 different versions of the cover before I got to this one, and all of them made me want to throw my brand new laptop against the wall. Hard.

So here’s what I finally came up with. It has elements of every Beauty and the Beast story on it, because that’s what it is, but I’m hoping I made one of those elements just unique enough to make it stand out. The tarot cards that play such a huge role in the story had to be included in some fashion, and three of the versions I attempted had them on the cover in different ways. I ultimately discarded them because, while they made amazingly stunning pictures, capturing particular scenes like a movie still, there was no way for me to add the book title and author name without completely ruining the effect.

This was my compromise: me going back to what feels natural to me, which is “less is more.” I didn’t want an overly elaborate scene, I wanted a visually striking representation of the story itself. I also wanted something stylistically similar to The Rebel Court series cover, since they both fall under similar genres, but not identical, because there are significant differences between the two series. Do you think I accomplished all that?

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