The making of a romance novel cover
When you pick up a romance novel and look at the images on the cover, do you ever wonder how these images were created? They are not just paintings somebody made up in their heads. Most of them started with a photo session with models like Jason Baca and Katherine Celio.
Jason Baca has appeared on the covers of more than 100 romance novels, lots of those were made from photos we created together in the studio. It is always a joy to work with Jason because he is so professional in every way, from showing up on time, prepared to work, open to ideas to try, and always acting professionally to make the female models feel at ease. It is important to Jason that he always create a positive image of himself, and let others model for negative roles. I am in total agreement with him, the name of my studio is “Positive” Vista, after all. This year we started creating images featuring Jason and a female model, and I am sure more of these images will be showing up on romance novel covers.
In order to create images that can be used by graphic artists to make the covers, for each session, we start with some concepts, story lines and then translate them to poses and lighting. The images can be adapted in many ways. Below are just some of the book covers featuring photos of Jason I took since 2011. If you look closely, you can see some images were used multiple times with modifications.