I'm not gonna lie. I was a little too overexcited to make this cover. I have been a fan of Fayesther's since reading her poetry during the Universal Awards. Poetry hits a soft spot for me as it's one of the ways I'm able to fully express myself. As the saying goes, "In it's limitations do I find the most freedom."

I've read a few chapters of this short story and it resonated with me because I understand being young and having to be so overwhelmed that you just escape into your imagination.

The Request:
-little girl, about 10 yrs old
-ash blonde hair and lilac-blue eyes
-fantasy
-maybe an apple tree or a magical breeze
--Challenge Accepted!--

Design Process: 4 hours max

Let's start with a base in this case, it's a little girl. This pic comes from Pexels; literally where 90% of my photos come from.

The glaring issue would be the fact that her hair is too dark to be ash blonde once I add the yellow to it.

No problem! First, I added a clipping layer (overlay) at 50% opacity. I painted white on her hair to lighten it up a bit. I then duplicated that overlay layer and set the second one to around 67% opacity.

You can see me testing the blonde color in the right picture.

Once I was happy with the lightness of her hair, I let her go full blonde.

Next, I added a color dodge layer. I airbrushed a glowing blue color in the center of the flower to give it sort of a magical feel. I also used white to add a little shine to her hair.

Next I painted her skin using a wide variety of color, svg, and overlay layers. I used a palette of oranges, reds, blues and pinks. The blue was used to add refracted light against the bits of her skin that the flower's glow would touch. I also didn't need to worry much about shading as the cover already had that covered. *snort-laugh*

For those of you who follow my cover tutorials, you should know by now that I like to paint. In fact, all of my covers have some sort of painted element. Speaking of painting...

Magical Painting Time! *insert whoosh effect here*

Took a textured brush and painted a swirl of magical leaves around her. To add some more details to it, I zoomed in and personally added a few highlights and shadows to the leaf storm. I was thinking of adding a color dodge layer to ramp up the glow, but decided against it.

Here's the title!  There are four different fonts here: cursive M, texts with leaves, a beautiful serif font, and a tree font.

I wanted to represent the tree that Meadow sits under so I decided to replace the "i" with it.

The last bit was just to add her name and some more color on her shoulders from the magical leaf swirl.

And voila! *in my bad Filipino accent* Tapos na!

*Thank you for checking out this cover tutorial. If you like the cover, go give Fayesther's works a read. I promise you that you won't be disappointed!*