Creating the Cover: The Bridge

Sunday, 25 August 2024

To create the cover art for The Bridge, I once again turned to Midjourney. Midjourney is an image-generator on the Discord server which I used to create the cover for The House Always Wins. I began by crafting the following prompt:

Movie poster for a gritty British detective drama. Photorealistic. View looking out to sea at an offshore wind farm. The turbines are arranged with one central and the others spread out behind. The turbines are viewed directly from the front. The sky and water are stormy and ominous. Use greys, blues and greens. Illuminate the centre of the image. Make the white and yellow of the turbines stand out. High contrast. —ar 5:8

This is what it came up with. I instantly loved it. I thought it captured the moody skies and seas that I was after.

I opened the image in Affinity Photo - an editing software similar to Photoshop. I adjusted the brightness and contrast then overlaid white on the turbine blades to make them stand out more and increased the saturation on the yellow transition pieces.

I returned to Midjourney to create the image of Cooper looking out to sea. It took a few attempts to get an image I was happy with, but I settled on this one:

I flipped the image, and removed her hair and the rest of the background. Then I brightened her coat as I was after a very vivid shade of yellow to contrast the blues and greys in the background. The process of selecting the individual blades of grass was undoubtedly the lengthiest.

I brought the two images together and lightened Cooper’s tights as they were hard to make out against the dark background.

Finally I added the text in the same fonts as the other books in the DCI Cooper series.

I hope you like it as much as I do!

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