Experimenting with Focal Points

I thought as I haven't blogged in about a week I would show you guys what I've been getting up to recently. I had some really good ideas for a main 'focal point' on the page which I believe is key in attracting people to pick up the book in a store over other books.

I really liked the silhouette idea with the skyline of a village, or a church however I felt that was again, too far from the truth. A church does appear in the book and plays a reasonable part in the story however I felt that would of given too much away, or perhaps the wrong impression about the book, and definitely didn't give a gang warfare feel. So I thought I would focus more on the urban city approach and here is what I came up with.

The skyline took a while to draw, one I traced from a picture online and I wanted to get the edges perfect, a clean cut font cover is very important as I think it makes the book instantly attractive, as opposed to a busy choppy rough edge cover. (Thats just my opinion).

I'm really happy with the Skyline, and it continues onto the backcover, but I still felt it was missing something. So I added another layer of a skyline, in yellow. I thought as I added a moon I could have a 'lit up' edge to them and it would bring the whole book alive, making it more visually interesting.

As you can see it makes the cover 10x better, making it stand out more but also more realistic and applying that nighttime urban feel which is what I am trying to convey.