Studies in Darkness ... and lighting!

Today I'm playing with lights -- and/or the lack of them. There's no limit to what you can do with the software ... the above image wasn't given any post-production work at all. Nada. What you see is just what rendered right out of the Studio 3 program itself.

We also made a great discovery t'other day: turns out, 3D Studio Max (which Dave uses), shares one export filter in common with DAZ's import filters. So now, we can create a model in Max, and ship it into DAZ. You have no idea how cool that is.

And this morning's work was a treat: I put together the wraparound paperback cover for Ground Zero -- based on the ebook cover:

Click on the above to see the whole thing at 1000 pixels wide. (Incidentally, the book is doing fantastic business -- it's somewhere around the 50 mark on the Amazon Kindle techno thrillers category list.)

The ebook cover was similar but ... different. It obviously doesn't make a shred of sense to have a back cover on an ebook! So I did a bounding box on the "front" and so firth. Paperback covers are a tad bit different, and you have a bit more latitude. If I'd had a lot of time, I'd have done a "widescreen" painting to wraparound the whole cover, but as it was, being thoroughly strapped for time, I did a gradient fill and overlaid the text in white. All that work was done in serif X3, while the artwork had already been done in DAZ.

The DAZ work was a profile shot overlaid against a background which I'd montaged from a nighttime cityscape (it's actually Sydney, not Adelaide) and an astronomy image of the Pleiades. The background montage was done in Micrographx, shipped out to Irfanview to be tweaked and resized, then imported into DAZ as the background. The model, who had been pre-designed (by me) was then merged into the shot and lit, using two spotlights, one a green so pale it was almost white, the other blue. The shot was then rendered and shipped back into Serif X3 to have its logos and graphics added. Mel Keegan was thrilled.

Jade - October 7

Feeling Blue

This one was done for a book cover -- you can tell by the 6x9 format the artwork has to be framed in. As a cover artist, you find you have a lot more latitude with paperbacks, which can wrap around, letting you design things like The Lords of Harbendane and Ice, Wind & Fire (see below -- and incidentally, click the Harbendane cover: it pulls up a 1000 pixel wide version that lets you get a good look at it.


The Harbendane cover is digital art -- meaning, it was painted inside the computer, 100%. On the other hand, no part of it was ever 3D. Whereas, Feeling Blue (top picture this post) was completely 3D and no part of him was painted. The sky is a shot taken in the backyard (!) and the model is ... well, you're back to faithful old Michael, from DAZ -- though I admit, I'd done a lot of work on him by the time I rendered this.

I get asked a lot, what paint program I use to do your actual painting (ie., airbrushing, merging, blending, virtual finger painting, inks and masks and so on). The only program I use for this work is Micrographx Picture Publisher 7. It costs about $15, it has every tool you can imagine and a lot you can't, and (miracle or miracles) the interface is so easy, so simple, it's almost turnkey. Start it up and PAINT, rather than spending two months learning how to use 9,999 things you don't have a use for. Micrographx is -- at least for me -- The Best. It also leaves the cash in your pocket.

Jade, October 6

Daydreaming under the vines...

Just a "beauty shot" today ... because I feel like it. The background for this is a photo taken a couple of years ago at a winery called Grant Burge Estates, which is north of Adelaide in the Barossa Valley region of South Aus. Glorious day (too hot, but brilliant sun). The model is yet another "build on the basic Michael figure. It's amazing what you can do, when you get to tweaking every feature in the face and body. The original figure ... wellllll, you'd swear that someone had digitized David Beckham, but starting with this as the base, I've seen the figure turned into every kind of face from Brad Pitt to Quasimodo! It's amazing.

Jade, October 5

Christmas Angel

No reason ... well, Christmas is right around the corner. Do you need another reason to make images like this? Christmas Angel. Right.

I did a series of these poses for the new Christmas pages that are currently going up at GLBT Bookshelf. I think this is the best, but Mel Keegan chose a different one to be the leader art on his own page. I also did the header for site's main Christmas page at the same time; but this one, above, is the best of today's bunch.