Fantasy warrior ... and this is another one I'll be sending to LuxRender in the fullness of time (meaning, when this current monster assignment is done and I have the time to think). This is a project spanning about eight years. I painted the first version of this book cover a long, long time ago, and at the time it was done completely digitally, without recourse to DAZ Studio, or Byrce. The whole thing was painted inside Micrographx Picture Publisher ... yes, it goes back so far, I didn't even have GIMP, much less the pocket-sized version of Photoshop I'm running now.
(I used to adore Micrographx, but on one of the PC upgrades that were necessary over the years I switched up to a 64 but system, and Micrographx ... ceased to work. For some time I ran on GIMP, but continual crashes and a lot of grumbling caused Dave to track down an affordable Photoshop for me; possibly to save his sanity. Ahem.)
Anyway ... time for a reboot of all these old covers, so here we are reimagining the character and scenario. But the backdrop remains perfect, transferred over directly from the original project. The sky was hand-painted from scratch; the lake is a location in Finland, overpainted from an image appearing in a tourist brochure; the foreground began life as a photo of "somewhere in Fairbanks, Alaska" -- one of my own shots, scanned in from a print.
Now, in this incarnation of the cover, it's one of my own Michael 4 characters (I've called him "the Raven" for years. You've seen him with wings, and sometimes in armor, four or five times on the blog here). He's the perfect choice for this project. The hair is the Yannis Rasta dreadlocks (by SAV, I believe), which suits this character to a "T" ... and the rest was a question of muted daylight: it would have been a mistake to overdrive the lights, given the soft colors and "sunset" kind of lighting in the background. The sword is one of the DM props -- from "The Shrine," as I recall (from Renderosity, like the dreads). And if I could only remember what the skinmap is, I'd be happy to tell you. That information has vanished utterly from my brain.
The 2000 pixel high raytrace took about an hour, then another hour of painting to bring it up to a place I was happy to call "finished." By far the longest time was spent in textures and lighting control. The beauty of it is, everything blends so well, you're not even noticing where the work was done ... a sure sign it was well done.
With that remark, I'm going to sign out and go grab some tea.
Followers, note: I'm very likely to disappear for a couple of weeks. A friend is coming in from the States, and Dave and I will be taking some time off to basically tour around the local area and have a well-earned break. But I'll be back before long: scores of images and stories are buzzing around in my head, and I'm really enjoying artwork again!
