Book cover art again ... soooo pretty, this one!

Somebody said the other day, "There used to be this great digital artist, went by the pen name -- or would it be 'brush name?' -- of Jade. Whatever happened to her?"

And someone else said, "I don't know ... she vanished. I think she might have died. Well, either that or she gave up the painting and got a goat farm in New Zealand, and she lives halfway up a mountainside right now, catching up on her sleep."

Hmmm. Chance, as the British say, would be a fine thing! No such luck, fellow travelers. August has simply been a blizzard of work, added to which, I haven't been well a lot of the time! Art? Yep, there's been TONS of it. All of the commercial variety, nothing creative ... nothing worth uploading, till this piece, which I did the other day.

A while ago I created a new character, using the Jerome skinmap and the Yannis Rasta dreadlocks, and I'd just gotten done rendering him when I thought, "I know who you are!" I hadn't set out to create Rogan Dahl from The Lords of Harbendane, but that's pretty much what happened accidentally. In the last month, I've been repackaging numerous books from our list, and it was just too great a temptation ... I had to do a new cover for Harbendane while I was there.

This is the third cover this book has had, and it's definitely the best. Here it is with its text objects pasted up:


Now, that's pretty! LGBT and m/m books need quite delicate cover art, because it's entirely possible Aunt Maud might be looking, and we don't want to give her a seizure. But on the other hand the art needs to be representational of the content of the story. Harbendane is a love story as well as a huge epic fantasy taking place in the northern valleys, and the bleaker lands not far south of the arctic circle. I think this piece does the job nicely.

These are two Michael 4s, obviously. Yannis Rastra Dreads and Jerome skinmap on Rogan (face and body morphs my me) while Tristan is wearing the Aether hair and the Mario skinmap. Rogan is wearing the Lockwood pants and the AS Narkilir shirt (all textures changed), and Tristan is wearing the Lockwood shirt and the Cold Life pants (all textures changed). In the background is a digital painting I did a couple of years ago for the original cover. The sky, mountains and foreground are literally cut out of three different photos, and painted together. This was done looooong before I had Photoshop, so the work was done in Micrografx. The foreground comprises the Rodi Design baby fir trees (from Content Paradise), and a bit of overpainting in Photoshop using Ron's Magical Snow brushes (from DAZ). Then the whole shebang was color saturated for extra impact, and shipped into Serif X3 for the text objects to be added.

So sorry to have been absent for eons! I'm almost at the end of the avalanche of work, and in the last couple of weeks I've bought loads of 3D models ... new skinmaps, hair, sets, props, Photoshop brushes ... that I haven't even unpacked yet. I'm dying to get to the end of the overwork, so I can get back to some art -- art for its own same. Ars gratia artis, pardon the Latin.

So, like the man said in the movie, I'll be back! Soon.

Jade, August 28

***Posted by MK because the internet is AWOL. Intermittent crap.

The hero again ... this guy reminds me of someone!

Eye candy, guys ... too tired to write much today. You know the feeling -- have been staring at the screen so long, my eyeballs feel fried! These were rendering away to themselves in the background, so -- enjoy! I uploaded them at large size, and they're well worth a look.

This character has been reminding me so much of someone, and it just dawned on me. I'm getting slow ... too much work, I think. Do you remember one of the heroes in The Lords of Harbendane -- the big, dark one with the dreadlocks and the muscles in places where most guys don't even have places?! Yeah, Rogan Dahl! Dead ringer. (Check it out here, but before you click, be aware of gay content: http://www.dream-craft.com/melkeegan/lords-of-harbendane.htm) As one review said, "Fantasy doesn't get any better than this." Speaking of fantasy, the new trailer for Conan the Barbarian is online, and looks intriguing. I stumbled over it when chasing a story about Johnny Depp signing for Pirates #5 --!

I'm very pleased with the omni lights on the figure. They render super-fast, and these renders also didn't take so much as a lick of post work. The backdrop was a quick digital painting -- all of four strokes and a bucket fill! The figure and costume (or lack of it...) hasn't changed since yesterday, so if you're wondering about the skinmap, hair and so forth, track down the details here.

With any luck at all, I'll be back tomorrow with some new toys to share. I got a new skinmap, a new set, and a fantastic new suite of seamless textures which will change the look and style of any costume they're slapped on. All I need now is the time to play!

And now ... tea, and a break before the evening starts. What day was today? Wednesday? Omigods. This week is turning into a blur. Somebody rush in and save me when it gets to Friday!

Jade, 6 July

Book covers ... and judging ebooks by them

Just a peek at what I'm up to in artwork today -- because I know I'm not going to have time to post something new. This is a "detail" outtake from a cover I'm working on ... processed to make a CG render look like it was painted on oil canvas.

Here's the whole cover painting -- but the canvas effect isn't going to show too well when Blogger is done resizing it:
Wellllll ... it shows a bit, but you don't get the full effect. This is the new cover for The Lords of Harbendane. The book came out a couple of years ago, and it is a fantastic fantasy novel. Why are we putting a new cover on it? You may well ask! Because the existing cover -- gorgeous though it is/was -- appears to be putting sales in jeopardy. We're not 100% sure about this, but there's one sure way to put the theory to the test, and that is to put a new cover on it and see what happens next.

So I took the existing background which was a digital painting done for the first version:
This, I stripped into DAZ Studio 3 as a background image. It's already a major piece of digital work -- the sky, the mountains, the lake and the foreground belong to three different pictures. The mountains are in Alaska. The foreground is in Finland. The sky is a digital airbrush painting ... this was one of the last projects I did prior to getting into full CG work. This was hand-painted in Micrografx, whereas today I'd do it in Bryce.

Next, design the characters, Rogan and Tristan:
Then, crop an area which will make a good ebook cover (paperbacks are going the way of the dodo. They're so expensive to set up, besides anything else. It will cost upwards of $100 to set up a paperback, and -- fact -- very few people are buying them anymore. Ebooks have won the war ... and Kindle has won the ebook contest! So, that the hey. Go with the flow).

Then front cover area was then shipped into GIMP to be painted a little bit in three corners -- just gives the work a better cohesion, since it's been turned from a landscape into a vignette. The GIMP version was then shipped back into Serif to have the canvas texture overlaid. Then these two were combined, and the composit was shipped out into Irfanview to be color corrected.

Then, back into Serif X3 to have the text objects overlaid:
And that's it -- done. Heck of a nice cover for an incredible book (almost mainstream fantasy, this one; the romance is gay, but it's so understated, the love story is part of a tapestry so vastly wider, the Rogan-and-Tris saga is only a small(ish) part of an epic.

Now, let's see if the new cover will inspire readers to give this novel a go. It's actually both tragic and weird that great books can be halfway undone by being jacketed in artwork which might be lovely in its own right, but just doesn't seem to fire the imagination of readers. So here's the experiment: let's see if this one does!

Jade, 15 October

The vampire displays a rare set of canines

At last, I managed to get an African skinmap ... and it's a beauty. The tones are rich, warm and beautiful, and when you bring the camera in tight, the texture of the map is also highly detailed.

This is the Zareb skinmap, but not the Zareb face. This face is one of my own. Rather a nice face ... makes me imagine a just-qualified young doctor of economics who's about to become the political leader of a stride-torn nation, and who's been surprised while on vacation after defending his PhD, and told he has to catch the next flight back to a home he hasn't seen in a decade, and take the reins.

Ouch. There's a monster novel in that, but I'd never be qualified in a zillion years to write it.

Anyway, the whole point of the renders is to try out a new skinmap, and I'll tell you, Zareb is a lovely, lovely map. Now, if only someone would do a great mane of dreads for M4, I could see about designing a face for Rogan -- "Rogue" -- from The Lords of Harbendane. I would dearly love to do that, but I don't think anyone's done dreads for M4 yet. We live in hopes!

Interested? Click here. One caveat: be aware of GLBT content, because it's a Mel Keegan novel, which means one of the romances will be gay. Might not be for younger readers, due to some very realistic battle scenes etc.

And now for something completely different!

The vampire Vladislav N. Stolitchniev has been annoyed enough to show his fangs! Now, I was going to be conservative about the fangs, and I came up with this:

To which Dave said, "You have GOT to be kidding, what a waste of an opportunity!" So here's the same image, with "Fangs by Dave" ...

And both of those were uploaded at 1:1 size, so you can click on them and see them just as they were rendered. Look at those fangs! Way to go, Dave. That'd sure keep me home nights...

Jade, 17 August

***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, too slow for this. Seriously, guys, I've got dialup speeds. How are you expected to do anything these days, at 1990 dialup speeds?!!!

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