Sedonia Guillone

Yesterday I was doing something to work on my website and scrolled down each page. Suddenly it struck me (not that it’s never happened before) that I’m really lucky with the cover artists who’ve done a bunch of my covers. Les Byerley, a Philadelphia based photographer, does all my covers at Ellora’s Cave.

I feel he does an absolutely incredible job each time of capturing the feeling I want for each cover. He really is very talented! My favorite one of his is this one for A Man for Michael (even though the cover for Manwich is fabulous!).

The other covers I’m enamored of are my White Tiger covers. (But you probably would have already guessed that, lol), the MOST incredible one being the most recent, not only because the men on the cover are really good fits for the characters, but because Lyn Taylor, who did this one, worked her tush off getting the tattoos just right! Anne Cain did the other two.

Ann set the stage for the theme of the White Tiger covers. She too, did an awesome job with the tattoos for Ryu, who, by the way, is a young blond Russian man in real life!

Here, on the Sudden Bliss cover, Naoto in the background, is two men spliced together because although his face fit the character well enough, his body was skinny whereas Naoto is brawny. Who knew how much cutting and pasting goes into these covers to get them just right? Well, the results are worth it. Covers we love to look at and which give us a feeling for the story inside.

Lyn Taylor is the cover artist for my next White Tigers release, Men of Tokyo: Sudden Surrender. She did such a fabulous job on the cover and I marvelled at how she achieved the realistic effect of full body tatoos on a man who doesn’t have any tatoos. Well, a fellow author, Anika Hamilton (I’ll tell you more about her on a later post) read on Lyn Taylor’s blog the whole process of how she made my book cover. It’s really fascinating and almost did her in. lol. I’m glad she stuck with it because the effect is fabulous. I glommed her post about it so you could read the amazing process by which she made this cover.

This is the first cover I have done of this series and damn if it wasn’t a tricky one LOL! I honestly thought that body tattoo was going to be the end of me as a cover artist. Seriously!

Anyway, because I’m pretty chuffed with how it turned out, I thought I’d share with you how I managed to pull it together.

First things first. I needed to find the characters. In all honesty there’s not a lot of Asian/Oriental guys available out there. Well. I don’t think chubby business man is quite in the ‘Erotic Cover’ league, but someone might yet surprise me.

Anyway, so I managed to find some nice bods. The guy on the left worked perfectly for the Character he was to portray. The Guy in the middle though, looked like he’d sucked on a lemon so I decided to lop off his head and give him a new one. Oh, if only it were so easy in real life, eh?

The original head I chose was a bit too ‘cranky’ so we went for the guy on the right. Sweet!
Okay, so now with lots of cutting and pasting of heads we have our two characters ready to go. Now for the hard bit.

The character over on the right called for a full body Yakuza tattoo - white tigers and cherry blossoms. O.M.G.!

Now I’m pretty adept these days at adding a tattoo here and there and getting them to look relatively natural. BUT a whole body tattoo??So the search began. Firstly I trawled through the stock sites. There were a few things I could have thrown together but in all honesty the amount of stock required would have killed me. However, in my searches I managed to stumble across this image on the right.

It had the tiger AND the blossoms. Bingo!

Unfortunately the tiger was yellow, but thanks to the desaturate tool I was able to leach out the colour and produce a white tiger. Next, it was obvious that this image was not going to fit on the big guy’s body without looking a bit odd. Plus the larger I stretched the image, the poorer the quality became. So I was going to have to keep my images small.What I ended up doing was creating a new document and copying and pasting parts of the image around the tiger, gradually expanding outwards. I’d blend the edges of the image so there was no obvious seam by erasing with a large, soft brush.

This gave me a broader canvas to work with. Also ensuring that I would not notice the edges of the cut & pastes in amongst all that busy background.

So back to the big guy. Using the expanded tattoo design, I enlarged it enough to cover his chest. I had to dabble with the perspective so that the angles were correct. Then using a displacement map of his torso, I was able to distort the tattoo so it fit to his chest. I worked like this in sections all over his torso, upper & lower arms and shoulders. Cutting and pasting, blending and merging sections of the basic design until I was happy that his body was covered.As you can imagine there were quite a few layers. At least 20 just to cover his torso, arms and shoulders. Once I had him covered I copied those layers and then merged them into one. I changed the layer to Multiply and fiddled with the opacity until it looked more natural. Phew!

My next challenge, but obviously not so difficult was to try to find an image of the Kanji for Suzuki. I did manage to find one but it was of poor quality. So I had to recreate it in a new document. I hope to god it is correct LOL! This was just a ‘normal’ tattoo that needed to go on the background guy.

The hard bit out of the way all I needed to do now was bring the design over from the previous ones of the series. Pop the the guy’s together, blend them in, fiddle with contrasts, shadows, highlights, etc and then go and find myself a nice quite corner to huddle in. LOL!

Of course there was a lot more fiddling involved, but I don’t want to bore you all with the details. This is just to give people the gist of what goes on behind the scenes.

…but I managed to slog through dozens and dozens of photographs of adorable buff guys to find my White Tigers. This is because a new website for the White Tigers series is being created. Yay! I’m really excited about that. Coming in summer 2008 all the delicious guys of the White Tiger will be there, including more information on the White Tiger path and other fun things, as well as the books, of course.
So far, I have Yuzo and Kiku (Men of Tokyo: Sudden Surrender, but I’ve also found the others and they will be available for a sneak peek in the near future. They’re perfectly gorgeous, each and everyone. I will let you know when the site is ready!

Today I did edits for A Werewolf for Christmas. I’ve also picked up Fantasy Thief again after setting down well over a year now. I really got sidetracked by my White Tigers series which I adore! Even so, I managed to put in one link to the men at the White Tiger to the hero in Fantasy Thief even though the hero in this story, Takeshi, is straight. Takeshi’s grandfather back in Tokyo is the elderly man who frequents the White Tiger and who is waited on by Ryu all the time. Old Mr. Hamura is mentioned briefly in Men of Phuket: Tongue-Thai’d and in Men of Tokyo: Sudden Bliss, he appears briefly walking through the hotel with Ryu. Mr. Hamura, though we don’t really meet him, was a cool guy, really loving with his grandson and, we learn, ends up being a true friend to Ryu.

Perhaps looking at those pics of Gackt really did give me the inspiration I’ve been needing! Madelynne sent me another picture of Gackt, this one which had served as the inspiration for her character, Takeshi, in her Black Lace erotic romance Dark Designs which I love so much I’ve begun to read a third time! I can’t get enough of the character she created. Inspiration below…

In my White Tigers series, the men of the White Tiger are skilled in the erotic arts. Really, in my intention, it means they are trained to pay careful attention - to a man’s unique scent and flavour, the sounds he make, the part of him that are particularly sensitive and bring him pleasure. The background research of the White Tigers’ methods really come from The Sexual Teachings of the White Tigress by Hsi Lai, a Westerner who has spent years with the female sexual Taoists in China, learning their ways and understanding their history. I first heard about this book from Jade Lee, my favorite erotic romance author whose exotic historical Tigress series takes place in Shanghai and has been endlessly inspiring. She admires the Tigresses for their courage in finding sexual pleasure and enlightnement in a repressive culture. I agree and also found that this methodology adapted itself quite well to m/m. I don’t necessarily think that’s it’s necessary to make the body immortal, but it seems that learning healthy sexual attitudes and practices of the body and spirit certainly can enhance our lives, something that I try to convey through my stories. Hope it’s working! Hugs, Sedonia

Hi All - This is a feature I plan to do regularly on my blog where I go behind the scenes of one of my books and talk about the inspirations that shaped that book. Of course, I welcome comments and questions! Today is A Man for Michael.Some readers and reviewers have made the observation that A Man for Michael makes them think of Jet Li’s film “Unleashed” (known in Europe and worldwide as “Danny the Dog”). Well, that’s because my book was truly inspired by it! I loved “Unleashed” and it made an impression on me, not only because to me Jet Li is one of the most adorable people ever. but because of the whole theme of freedom and how Danny went from an environment of being used to a place where he was loved. I guess you could say that this is a fan fiction tribute to Jet Li and to this movie, done Sedonia style because whenever I begin to conceive a story, it always ends up as an erotic romance!