I guess today proves that necessity is at least the maiden aunt of invention, and that interesting things can come out of the most frustrating circumstances...
Picture, if you will: I'm working along, creating all the elements for the new cover for Nocturne. Working in DAZ with two characters, about two dozen lights with complex settings. I save my work regularly. And then, with about three steps to go before the project is complete, wham! DAZ Studio 3 puts up this innocent little message, "Error while rendering." Program crashes to desktop. So you growl and go back to the saved ones ... or where the saved ones ought to be. Try this one on for size: DAZ was not saving. It was only telling me it was saving.
Ouch! So I wound up with two out of four of the pieces that were supposed to go together to make up the Nocturne art I'd had in mind, both saved as exports along the way; and after the crash I lost not only the poses (which are dead easy to recreate and not much of an issue), but about half an hour's worth of industrial strength fiddling with the lights.
Well, I supposed I could have done the whole thing over, but the truth is, I was way too disgruntled to tackle it, and decided to see what I could do with the pieces that survived instead. Hmmmm ... what I ended up with was a painting, and a damn' nice one. Very, very different from the project I envisioned when I started, but still a very nice painting.
Now, I'm not saying I'll go with this piece of artwork for the actual cover of Nocturne, maybe because the book is the textual equivalent of "Ben Hur Meets Avatar, with Gay Vampires" and it actually deserves to have an amazing technicolor cover! But it's definitely worth a look -- worth uploading.
The other piece -- the male nude with the full moon -- is the cover for Dangerous Moonlight. As the English say, that book has had more covers than I've had hot lunches! This one is a synthesis of them all, and I'm very, very pleased with it. This is definitely going to be on the epub version which goes into circulation in a few days. Nice!
The image of the moon is interesting: it's a picture captured with a long, long lens over the roof of the backyard shed, about five years ago!
And here's what the job looks like with text objects pasted up:
And sure, I'll go back to the Nocturne cover and do it over tomorrow. Luckily, the vision of the "proper" cover is still hovering in my imagination, and I'll beat it into shape tomorrow!
Jade, 23 July
***Posted by MK because the internet is AWOL. Intermittent crap.
