I usually go through a process to complete my book covers. I thought you might enjoy taking a look at a progression of cover designs to completion. I was in a kind of quandary about the bottom two right illustrations, because I like them both for different reasons. I like the silver suited Rockeman and the hot, thermal glass on his helmet and the muted frames on the sides. But the other one has more definition in terms of making Rockeman stand out and since he is the hero, even though the real Rocketman is inside the suit, not the suit itself, still the colors are more comfortable to the eye and more clear. Now as to the process of actually creating Rocketman, that's another story. Revamped the site a biit and added a New Work section. When I have something new to post it will go there first usually. After some time I will remove the image to one of my permanent galleys or slideshows. Enjoy! Click on above image to go to New Work!
Fractal Flames are awesome and colorful abstract designs! If you've never seen a Fractal Flame before, then you're in for a real treat. These visual delights can take anywhere from a few minutes to design to hours and hours and even many days to completely finish. Computer design is not like taking out a canvas and splashing paint of some kind on it and them blending it together to get a finished product. Computer design takes powerful computers with very expensive software sometimes and if you're lucky free ones that are capable of pushing the limits of visual boundaries. I probably spend more time making mistakes than making visual art that is perfect or at least satisfactory. It's again, not like canvas. You can delete it , yes; but because of the subtleties of any visual design you can spend hours and days just working with the color combinations alone until you find one that tickles your fancy and can bring life to the canvas of your computer screen and hopefully later to an actual canvas via gieckly painting. Probably very few people, even artists realize how much work goes into creating a piece like the one above. So much trial and error sometimes it actuallly gets you wanting to pack up your bags and move to the South Pole with Santa.
But actually, what's so cool about this art form is that once you grasp the principals of fractal flames, then you can create designs that are fractal flames without having to use software that creates only that. In nature fractal flames exist in the form of snowflakes, artichokes, tree leaves, mountain ranges, desert blossoms and so on and on. Mankind has come to create some of the finest fractal designs itself in the form of the geodesic dome which has repeating octagonal shapes as well as beautiful temples and other structures of note. In this section of the store you will find Fractal Flames that are pure and untouched, as well as others which I have tweaked extensively in order to bring out their shapes and emphasize something I liked in them, but which did not exist in the original flame itself. Enjoy your journey through my Fractal Flames. I know I did. John Today I finished putting more artwork on this site under the category of Book Covers. Take a look at how some of my work has changed over time as I learn what works best or how to alter something without losing the original's impact. Above you can see five different versions of my Invaders from the Cowboy Skies cover. Some are very similar and others are leaps apart. Some of it has to do with wanting to make them stand out, some for the text to be readable or stand out, and some for color scheme and some for a myriad of other reasons which I'll leave to your imagination.
Until the next post. Enjoy and have a happy life! John While I wrote the novel "Perihelion" over a series of chapters that I used as unique stories that could stand up by themselves, my goal was to have an end product. A readable novel of a certain length.
When I sit down to read a book the first thing my mind does is relish the cover. If it's a good cover, it wets my appetite for the interior of the book. While sometimes a cover can be a compete fraud and give you absolutely nothing of value relative to the content inside, when it does parallel the story/facts of the novel that enhancement is like adding a condiment or spice to your food. What was good before, becomes even more tasty. You ask "How did you come up with this cover?" My answer: I didn't at first. Why? Because I wasn't sure whether to emphasize the characters or the idea. I am not much of an artist when it comes to adult characters or at this point don't have the resources to purchase professional models to act out my stories in front of a camera, which I'm pretty sure is what most professionals with an established readership do, or at least their publishers do. I've learned many writers, the self published ones, like I am, use copyright images that can be purchased for a simple fee on the Internet. Now that's a good thing and a bad thing at the same time. On the one hand you have a definite product you can use at once. But on the other hand it's probably not exactly what you need, so then you must tweak it. So how does one go about tweaking a real life picture of a human being? From what I know of illustration and I've been an illustrator for over thirty years, I'm pretty sure they do it by fudging the images. What this means is that they hide portions of the actor, or add parts of other images to draw the emphasis to , so that the lacking character qualities aren't missing. You want a lusty picture, then you get someone who has a certain look, then add items into the image that imply lust, even though they might not be really that. I learned from a film class at UNLV a long time ago that Russian directors learned that by having an actor look at a particular object or person, they could give that actor the quality of that observation. Hence, get an actor and have them look at a sad person, and you see compassion coming from them, even thought that is totally an illusion. As you can see from my cover there is no cheating in this in terms of real people. I chose instead to go the way of the intellect for this one. Why? Because the main theme of the book is the use of the intellect to conquer time and space limitations. That a group of scientists became so involved in their project that their very words themselves became charged with energy and thus became transportation to adventures in fairy tale and science fiction realms. Now that you understand my thinking behind the beginning of my process of creation, the next blog will be about how I actually constructed this image. Until then, be peaceful and have a happy life as best you can. John |
AuthorI was raised with a computer chip in the right side of my brain and an artist's brush in the left. The result: A complete Digital Nerd quite capable of painting the universe in shades of binary code. ArchivesCategories
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