The cover for Sherlock Holmes and 'The Kiss of Death'  was designed to have the look and feel of a magician's lithograph poster from the late 1800s.

I developed the book cover using Paint Shop Pro software.  The calabash pipe was digitally photographed and pasted into a 'layer' using the software.  The edges of the pipe were cleaned up and a plastic effect was applied to give it a surreal look.  Then the snake was drawn using an airbrush effect with transparency and a tile effect applied.  The letters were painstakingly constructed before applying a blur effect to blend everything.

For the back cover I used the same background gradient and drew the wand on its own layer using the software.  After rendering the wand, I resized the pipe and cut it in half into two layers and ordered the wand layer between the two pipe layers.  For the mirror shadow effect I copied the pipe and wand to a new image, changed it to grayscale, resized it at 95%, rotated it left 2 degrees and pasted it back in its own layer which is set at 25% opacity.

(click on a cover to view full size)