Any Advice or Pointers on Bookcovers?

IceScribe

I am lucky to know an author. She is the main motivation I have for getting involved in 3d art in the first place. Before that, I felt pretty darn good making signature tag images for a forum. She's made me push past boundaries I didn't realize I had. Because of her, I have invested in 3d art so that I will be able to come up with interesting artwork for her consideration. Not always what she wanted but her patience and invitation to work on 2 covers before has brought me to a new book cover. I want to do the best I can for her work. I think I can deliver a much supeiror work than before. But she always pushes me past my comfort zone, LOL!

Now, she has requested some work that is like "bodice ripper" style. I have no experience with this, as I do not read romances. I kind of get the pulp/fantasy aspect, but my lighting is amateur, and my compostion is less than desireable. She doesn't know the artistic terms so I work on a "not this/not that" basis, which is time consuming and gets pretty frustrating for both of us.

My recent attempt is closer, but it's not as sophisticated as she would like. I'd like to render a much better cover image for her, but I just don't know the genre. I don't read ebooks, or even printed books much these days. And if I were, I prefer cozy detective stories, completely different pov.

Does anyone have any suggestion on how to learn more about book covers in the romance style, particularly "bodice rippers"? Its such a great phrase, but I don't know how to translate that into characters and poses that will print cleanly. I do know about cyan print versus rgvb of digital, but that's not the issue. I can't seem to get the composition or lighting to look "right". I'm using the DAZ 4.0 t render. She likes the coloration and quality, it's my abilities that need tweakin', Lol!

Serene Night

Bodice ripper covers were big in the 80s. They aren't as big these days in favor of photographs. You can look up the pictures of Pino Dangelico. He is an excellent example of beautiful cover work. He paints beautiful characters.

Pixel8ted

Still love those things...

Think steamy embrace...sexy guy; six pack abs; shirtless or nearly shirtless and attractive female either clinched in an embrace or holding onto him. BTW, she's always good looking and showing as much skin as period clothing allows. In most versions both male and female have long flowy hair. Fabio was on a lot of covers (400) back in the 80's and early 90's.

Put Fabio in search bar then hit images in Google's search bar then click images.

Another good search term would be bodice ripper romance novels...again click images.

FirstBastion

First thing you need to do is search the competition and do market research on romance novels. If you type in romance and bodice into amazon, you get no shortage of book covers.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=romance+novels+bodice&rh=i:aps,k:romance+novels+bodice

You should also have her tell you, "I want it to look something like this" and then she can point you to 5 or 10 cover arts that put you in the ball park of what she wants.

Since there's certain genre elements to these you should be able to fine tune your composition and subject matter by checking out the structural patterns in the various cover art.

There's no shortage of couples poses in the store; these links should help.

http://www.daz3d.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=couples

Now your author friend needs to tell you what her new book is about, time period, her absolute favorite scene description, central story conflict, and pick that as the moment in time for the book cover's image. Better still , read it. Usually a visual image will form in your mind's eye. Use it.

Pick up the appropriate clothing models (historical, modern, ...) hopefully with built in morphs that can be "bodice ripped"

Lightsets in the store can help with lighting for your program of choice.

Mistara

don't forget to add pixels to your render for full bleed. don't put text or important stuff near the edges, might get hacked off during cropping.

for print on demand books leave room around the text on the spine, they'll make you do it over and reorder a proof copy.

don't be so enamored of the graphic that the title looks like an afterthought.

Good Luck!

TheWheelMan

Find out where she's going to publish the book, and if she hasn't chosen yet, tell her to do so now. You need to know the exact specifications that you'll need for the image, and you can't know that without knowing which POD company she's publishing with. All of them are similar, but as of right now, you have no experience or knowledge with any of them. So you need to be able to research and learn them.

StratDragon

female 3/4 view back to viewer, head tilted to the left with a facial expression of "If this is wrong I don't want to be right" or "maybe I do like vanilla!"; her dress strategically ripped at the back giving hint of a recent surgery that may have included helium. The male (rich full head of hair and more importantly hair product) is usually shown at 7/8 view hands on female (3 hands is okay), set nostril flare morph at 135% and you can't inject too many muscle morphs.
There should a window in the room overlooking a cove, in the distance there is a large sea going vessel tossing about in the waves and it's full of sailors... what's the other word for sailors?

CypherFOX

Greetings,

StratDragon said:

female 3/4 view back to viewer, head tilted to the left with a facial expression of "If this is wrong I don't want to be right" or "maybe I do like vanilla!"; her dress strategically ripped at the back giving hint of a recent surgery that may have included helium. The male (rich full head of hair and more importantly hair product) is usually shown at 7/8 view hands on female (3 hands is okay), set nostril flare morph at 135% and you can't inject too many muscle morphs.
There should a window in the room overlooking a cove, in the distance there is a large sea going vessel tossing about in the waves and it's full of sailors... what's the other word for sailors?

_falls over!_

Dammit where's the 'Like!' button on this forum?!

Yep, that covers it pretty well!

-- Morgan
[edit: Now I just spent the last hour and a half building a moderate bodice-ripper-esque scene because of you! :) And now I have to wait the year it takes to render...!]

Rareth

StratDragon said:

female 3/4 view back to viewer, head tilted to the left with a facial expression of "If this is wrong I don't want to be right" or "maybe I do like vanilla!"; her dress strategically ripped at the back giving hint of a recent surgery that may have included helium. The male (rich full head of hair and more importantly hair product) is usually shown at 7/8 view hands on female (3 hands is okay), set nostril flare morph at 135% and you can't inject too many muscle morphs.
There should a window in the room overlooking a cove, in the distance there is a large sea going vessel tossing about in the waves and it's full of sailors... what's the other word for sailors?

LOL that's like 90% of the covers of the Romance Books my mom used to read, the other 10% had horses and mountains out the window..

IceScribe

SereneNight said:

Bodice ripper covers were big in the 80s. They aren't as big these days in favor of photographs. You can look up the pictures of Pino Dangelico. He is an excellent example of beautiful cover work. He paints beautiful characters.

@SereneNight

thank you for point me to Pino Dangelico. I think his art is very romantic. I was able to point my author to his work to get some ideas for her cover.

IceScribe

Pixel8ted said:

Still love those things...

Think steamy embrace...sexy guy; six pack abs; shirtless or nearly shirtless and attractive female either clinched in an embrace or holding onto him. BTW, she's always good looking and showing as much skin as period clothing allows. In most versions both male and female have long flowy hair. Fabio was on a lot of covers (400) back in the 80's and early 90's.

Put Fabio in search bar then hit images in Google's search bar then click images.

Another good search term would be bodice ripper romance novels...again click images.

@Pixel8ted

I remember seeing paperback covers at the bookstore. Fabio, with the flowing locks. Wow. I had no idea he did book covers.

My searches for the terms did bring up quite a variety of romance images, but I was confused about my author's specific request. .

IceScribe

FirstBastion said:

First thing you need to do is search the competition and do market research on romance novels. If you type in romance and bodice into amazon, you get no shortage of book covers.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=romance+novels+bodice&rh=i:aps,k:romance+novels+bodice

You should also have her tell you, "I want it to look something like this" and then she can point you to 5 or 10 cover arts that put you in the ball park of what she wants.

Since there's certain genre elements to these you should be able to fine tune your composition and subject matter by checking out the structural patterns in the various cover art.

There's no shortage of couples poses in the store; these links should help.

http://www.daz3d.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=couples

Now your author friend needs to tell you what her new book is about, time period, her absolute favorite scene description, central story conflict, and pick that as the moment in time for the book cover's image. Better still , read it. Usually a visual image will form in your mind's eye. Use it.

Pick up the appropriate clothing models (historical, modern, ...) hopefully with built in morphs that can be "bodice ripped"

Lightsets in the store can help with lighting for your program of choice.

@FirstBastion

thank you for the specific pointers. It's been a guessing game until she finally sent me a copy of the galley. I searched on the main characters names, and got to their description.I had a vision, but, LOL, it turned out to be quite different. Still, I gave her choices by giving her the urls and letting her tell me what she liked and doing some test renders. I did find costumes she liked, but no rip able bodices. In fact no bodice was harmed in this project.

IceScribe

Misty Whisky said:

don't forget to add pixels to your render for full bleed. don't put text or important stuff near the edges, might get hacked off during cropping.

for print on demand books leave room around the text on the spine, they'll make you do it over and reorder a proof copy.

don't be so enamored of the graphic that the title looks like an afterthought.

Good Luck!

@Misty Whiskey
My author did give me cropping dimensions and resolution, but I don't know what "full bleed is". She was very specific on the title font and size.

IceScribe

TheWheelMan said:

Find out where she's going to publish the book, and if she hasn't chosen yet, tell her to do so now. You need to know the exact specifications that you'll need for the image, and you can't know that without knowing which POD company she's publishing with. All of them are similar, but as of right now, you have no experience or knowledge with any of them. So you need to be able to research and learn them.

@TheWheelMan

She has not mentioned the publisher all this while, but apparently they have specifications which she gave me. One problem I had was with aspect ratio. I'm such a jump and render type, I don't know these important things except by trial and error.

IceScribe

StratDragon said:

female 3/4 view back to viewer, head tilted to the left with a facial expression of "If this is wrong I don't want to be right" or "maybe I do like vanilla!"; her dress strategically ripped at the back giving hint of a recent surgery that may have included helium. The male (rich full head of hair and more importantly hair product) is usually shown at 7/8 view hands on female (3 hands is okay), set nostril flare morph at 135% and you can't inject too many muscle morphs.
There should a window in the room overlooking a cove, in the distance there is a large sea going vessel tossing about in the waves and it's full of sailors... what's the other word for sailors?

@StratDragon

I almost choked on my favorite beverage reading this! Okay, that really helped me! I have been so focused on doing this "right", not having much experience with this genre, I needed a good thorough explanation like this to get the picture!

IceScribe

Hey Everybody,

thank you all for such good advice. It will all be put to good use...because my author liked what I came up with (after a half-dozen right turns, and changes in elements, and clothes, and models, and predominant color and more) It's turned out to be not a bodice ripper, after all, but I think I might tempt her with some other work not under such a tight deadline.

I learned so much, from fine art to hyperbolic art, that I actually came up with some other ideas. She was so pleased with the final render she has asked me if I am interested in doing another cover soon.

Yes, I am!