Okay, here’s more of a final cover for The Shadow at the Gate. Josh sent me the new version of the illustration this afternoon, so I tackled the final after dinner. I seriously need to take an Illustrator class. It took me about half an hour to figure out how to get that text behind her. Oh well. Done.
Ooooo. I like.
There does seem to be something slightly different between the title and author text. I can’t quite put my finger on it. It’s almost like some sort of anti-aliasing or blending. The text at the bottom looks more natural. I suspect it may be the think stroke. You might want to try using a second gradient fill that’s offset from centre (use the appearance tab to add a second fill and then use the offset path effect). Or a drop shadow, maybe. If you go the offset path effect, you may have to break your text into outlines and apply the style to each glyph.
Regarding getting the text behind her, my immediate thought would be a clipping path, but certainly the easiest away would be if the various elements of the illustration are (whether raster or vector) broken into layers so you could simply rearrange the layers appropriately. Is the original cover illustration broken into such elements or did you employ a clipping path?
Hey MC – yeah, you’re right: the text at top has a .25 stroke around it, and the text at the bottom has nothing. I’ll fiddle more with that top text. Thanks for the advice, that’s much appreciated.
The illustration came in only a flat image, so I ended up realizing that I could turn the text into outlines and then simply erase away the overlapping sections of the text. Didn’t work too bad… Back to the layers!
I didn’t even think of doing that, but that would definitely be simpler than clipping masks.
– Carp