What to do with all those images you’ve been creating with Stable Diffusion? Are you a child of the 80s and 90s? Let’s make some spoof paperback book covers! In this post I recreate paperback templates from my own childhood favourites and upload them here for you to use at your own leisure.
Today, R.L. Stine’s Goosebump series. People have been using Goosebump covers as spoofy templates for years. They look great wrapped around a hokey family photo. These are also great fun wrapped around an AI generated image because Stable Diffusion is very good at creating wacky, sci-fi worlds where something is just a little off. This describes R.L. Stine’s middle grade horror stories perfectly.
WHO ILLUSTRATED THE GOOSEBUMPS COVERS?
Shoutout to the real main illustrator of the Goosebumps series, Tim Jacobus, who created plenty of nightmarish covers between 1992 and 2000.
For the record, this post features spoof covers — parodies — not real books. They don’t exist in the world and have nothing to do with any publishing company, author or illustrator.
WHAT IS STABLE DIFFUSION?
Stable Diffusion is a text-to-image model for creating artificially generated art, released to the public for free in 2022.
I’m using the Automatic1111 fork of Stable Diffusion on a local computer and my favourite model right now is Dreamlike Diffusion 1.0.
See also: Getting Started With Stable Diffusion. You no longer need a powerful computer with Stable Diffusion installed locally because there are places on the Internet where you can create AI art for free.
Some of the actual Goosebumps covers look like this:
But I’ll stick to this design:
Here’s a full cover. (Click to enlarge.)
And here’s my spoof:
FREE BOOK COVER TEMPLATE DOWNLOADS
PNG files can be used as an overlay.
I recommend Photopea for anyone without access to Photoshop or other photo software. (It’s like ‘free Photoshop online’ and great for classroom use.) Photopea will open the PSD files below although it doesn’t retain editable text.
THE FONT
I’m using approximations.
I’ve used Londrina Solid for the book title. That’s not quite right but I prefer it over whatever the Goosebumps font is. You may have Bebas Neue on your computer, which is fine, though also not exactly right.
The tagline has a drop shadow to make it stand out against the art. I’ve used a font called Stoke and decreased the spacing. You might also use Miltonian Tattoo, Sherlock, Spectral, or any number of other fonts with an unobtrusive serif.
For the back cover I’ve used Fuse for the ‘title’ at the top and Galatea (light narrow) for the copy. (Rather than finding the exact Goosebumps font, you’re better off getting the spacing right.)
GOOSEBUMPS BOOK COVER DOWNLOAD
- PSD file
- Affinity Photo file
- PNG overlays: full cover, front cover only. Use the paint bucket tool to change the colours. Goosebump colours. (Import the jpeg into your document and use the colour picker to select.)
