THE LIGHTNING THIEF
A BOOK COVER CASE STUDY
The Lightning Thief is a book I read when I was a child that I never forgot and that inspired my love for the Greeks. When I first read the book, I fit the demographic for the book series, since then I’ve grown considerably older & no longer fit the initial age range. After seeing The Lightning Thief movie I had the idea of creating a dust jacket design for The Lightning Thief as if it were a book for young adults rather than preteens.
I was pretty positive about what I wanted to do for the cover however, finding free stock photos of an old sword that isn't rusty is apparently hard to come by. After hours of looking through countless stock databases, I found a few photos that I could work with well enough. I'd never done a lightning effect in Photoshop before so I was pretty excited to try out difference clouds. However, this method wasn’t working out the way I had pictured things in my head to I decided to try my luck with brushes. To my surprise, I ended up with what I initially set out to make.
With the lightning out of the way, I had to set about getting the sword to at least somewhat resemble the sword described in the book, though it’s still not an exact replica I got as close to it as I could with my skills at the time. Finally, I went on to recreate the text layout for the original book design. I decided that the original typeface and layout just felt right even with the new design. With the design complete I’m now stuck with the longing for this series having a young adult feel...
