The cover artist's quotidian conundrum

Your mission, should you be unable to dodge it: After all this SF and fantasy art, with the tonnage of gravitas and all the high-powered heroes ... now, sit down and package a domestic comedy which doesn't have the slightest bit of gravitas or so much as an erg of high-power! Oh...boy.

For those who came in late:

Okay: so far it's been all guns and swords, rain forest, stone circles on the tundra, the planet Jupiter ... and now you have to design an engaging cover for a tale that's witty, quirky, often downright hilarious, set in an ordinary house, in an average Californian suburb, featuring an ailing cactus plant and an elderly lady with a deadly vacuum cleaner. Eep.

Well ... try this:

With about thirty minutes to spare -- literally -- I remembered that good old DAZ Studio renders to cartoons. What better way to change pace, strip away any hint of seriousness, than to fall back on comic art to illustrate a comic situation. And it works!

Which is not to say that comic art can't be absolutely astonishing. If you're 17 or older (!) go do a Google image search. Here's your search term: "Warlord of Mars Deja Thoris," Ye gods. It's a Dark Horse comic. (Where was John Carter when all this was going on?!) But --

All that blood 'n guts 'n bare flesh -- exactly what we don't want here, today. So ... a cartoon render (lightning fast), plus a quick recombination of old elements in the trusty Photoshop; then splatter a lot of digital paint around, and -- there. Done.

Incidentally, if you're trying to find this function in Studio, it's in your Render Settings dialog. Have fun playing!

Fantasy in DAZ Studio: Swords in the Sunset

...A raytrace in good old Studio, with a mountain of Photoshop painting. The background was worked separately, of course, starting with a sunset shot. Depth of field is ON, with the focus set on the hand that's holding the sword, so the face is juuuust a little soft, which gives a gorgeous effect:

This also has the effect of concentrating the focus of the piece on the weapon and, by extension, on the skill demanded by the weapon, which is very fitting for this story. Yep: book cover assignment.

The model is DAZ's Michael, of course, but the face and body were designed by me. This is a character I created a few years ago ... and I'd love to see how he'd render up in Lux. The skin map is Atlas (from Renderosity); the hair is Akaste (ditto), with just a little hand-painting added. The sword is the VAL Rapier Mystic, but I did change out all the textures for my own. The costume is a mix of bits and pieces, bit from here, bit from there, and again, I switched out most of the textures. 

The lighting: firelight, with very soft shadows. As  mentioned, depth of field is ON, with the virtual aperture set at f/22, so you get decent DOF even in very soft light. (The setting for the story was a caravanserai on a desert road, in a fantasy world ... the assassin and the fire juggler; and it all played out between one evening and the next dawn, as I recall.)

The flavor and quality of this one is closer to painting than render. I'm almost tempted to go in and plunk a canvas texture on it. Should I??? Naaah. It's way too nice as it is. 

Well, this is a fairly luscious fantasy; just not the one I was planning! Once again I got stuck for time and opted for something I knew I could do in the available hours, rather than starting something and shuffling it off onto the back burner "for another free afternoon." This turned out not to be the free afternoon I'd been hoping for. So -- try again tomorrow. I think this makes five covers  I've done ... a couple more, and this part of the assignment is complete. Then I'm on a break and will be "doing my own thing." And yes, there's some technicolor stuff percolating in my brain. Got a whole new fantasy project on the simmer.

DAZ's Michael stars in another fantasy book cover project

Hell bent on Revenge would be the title of this piece -- a fantasy book cover, as you can guess. The question is, can you guess which one?! Give it some thought ... you might actually have read it! Take the stone circle in the winter storm background as your clue...

This is "just" a raytrace with two distant lights, plus a backdrop that was painted separately, and then a hulluvalot of Photoshop painting over the top. I did send it to LuxRender to see how it would look there ... and for some reason Lux ignored virtually every texture on the costume and sword. verything dropped out, leaving just plastic bits behind. So odd. and quite nasty I could have done the textures over, in the Reality "bridge" interface, but the work would have consumed hours, what with the test renders. Fact is, I didn't have the time, so --

Back to a raytrace and Photoshop to the rescue!

I'd intended a luscious fantasy today, but didn't get the chance to get it done. Tomorrow. I'm about halfway through the first part of the book cover assignment, so I can afford to take a break. I'm actually ahead of the curve, time-wise, so ... something lush and extravagant next!

Reflections on the water. With ducklings.

Well ... fudgesickles, as Dave says. A couple of hours' excursion to the national park turned into a priceless photo op, with the most amazing stuff right in front of the camera ... and it turned out, the light levels were too low for a compact digital to produce more than a handful of good pictures, counterbalanced by a huge amount of dross headed for the bin. So here I am turning some of the shots into art, by messing about in Irfanview...

Yeah, okay, the art is dandy, but I'd rather have had a swag of top-notch photos! There were ducklings, and parrots, and miners, and a darter ... birding is a hobby of ours. On the rare occasion when the camera actually got its tiny little brain around the job, I came up with pictures like this:

That's a darter, in the "above" shot, and the magpie and miners in the "below" shot. You can't imagine the shots that got away. Sigh. Well, as someone wise once said, "You can't get a coconut every time." So ... let's put some of the lesser dross through the process and resurrect them as art:

These were all done in Irfanview, just pushing and pulling color values, over-driving contrast, blurring and sharpening. Some really neat results. But ... oh, the opportunity that just went walkies! Better luck next time. And next time the light levels are low, I'll click the whole thing over to full manual ... cut some of the technology out of the loop and do it the old fashioned way.