Witchy Wickedness [resubmit]

As Hitch points out, it’s awfully similar to Charmed and Buffy The Vampire Slayer in a lot of respects; and as I’m pointing out, the cutting and pasting are still far too obvious, maybe even more so than before. All those wild curls in the title font coupled with the minimal anti-aliasing make it difficult to read in thumbnail, as does the rather spidery-thin and similarly over-sharpened font of the byline. Other than that, the picture’s fairly clear in thumbnail, but all kinds of subtle flaws (such as the disproportionate size of the hand that Ron Miller noticed) start popping out at the viewer when seeing the cover at closer to fuller size.

If you want to refine your technique, I’d recommend focusing mainly on improving the blending of your artwork. The girl’s hair is the biggest giveaway to her being cut-and-pasted, but the sharp edges on all of her clothing are pretty revealing too. Softening those edges with one of your image editor’s airbrushing tools might help a little, but would still be a bit too noticeable at a larger size.

Mainly, I think you’re using the wrong tools for the job: no matter how you fine-tune the trimming and “magic wand” tools on your program, they can never capture all the strands of a girl’s hair and all the fluff of her clothes properly when transferring her from one picture to another. My secret, when working with any kind of stock image model, is to look for models set against a blank white background, and then use the program’s selection tools to select all that white space up to and into where it borders the model. Once you’ve got it selected, it’s pretty easy (especially with a dark-haired model whose hair completely surrounds her face as in your case) to use the “color to transparency” function on your editor (if yours doesn’t have it, get one that does; GIMP has it, and is free) to wipe out all the white while preserving all the fuzzy hair strands and ragged edges to the clothing for transfer.

As for the “nimbus” around the girl (I seem to recall that’s what we were calling such things a few covers ago), it does seem a bit lackluster right now as the other critics have noted. While you certainly should extend it out to the athame or any other object you want to portray your model holding as others have suggested, a simple even-sized glow around the model looks cheap and amateurish like those blue-screen lines fantasy movie makers had around too many of their characters in the 1980s until they finally figured out how to blend their moving images properly. For more professional-looking results, I recommend placing the silhouetted glow against a bunch of ragged swirly stuff the same color and mixing these together so that the glow looks like it’s flaring out more chaotically the way energy fields (and clouds and plasma and the like) typically do.

Finally, while it’s all right for fonts to be swirly, soften the edges a bit more before you go setting such solid edges against such a fluid background, and make both the title and byline big enough to fill their section of the cover. It’s not as if your prospective readers are going to care if they can’t see every last part of the Moon overhead or the girl’s jeans down below. As long as they can see what’s important (her face, some of her relatively modern clothing, the magical field around her, and any magical implements she’s holding/wearing), everything else on the cover is of only secondary importance at best.