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Thank you, all! Going to run my next few through here, as soon as things settle down some at home.
Next art prompt turned ebook cover.
Don't know how to make the covers full size....
You mean you don't know how to add it to the post after you've uploaded the attachment? After you've uploaded your attachment and posted the post, go back and click on the gear at the top right corner of your post. A box should pop up with the word "Edit" in it. Click on edit.
Open your uploaded image into a new tab so that it is full size. I think you get a different url when it you right click on the attachment but I'm not positive about that so I always open my attachments in a new window for the full size version. Right click on your full size image so that you get a popup with some choices. You want to "Copy Image Location".
Put your cursor in the box that says "URL" and paste that image location into the URL box.
Make sure you set the image size to 800 or less. Maximum size for the forums is 800 because that what works best for viewing on multiple devices so that is what is preffered by the forums.
Click on that tab that says Link and there is another place to copy a URL. Paste your copied location link there as well. You can set how you want the image to open by selecting an option in the dropdown menu that says Target. I think most people prefer having it go to a new window. I know I do. I believe if you leave it blank the default is to open however the viewer's browser defaults are set but I'm not positive about that.
I think that's everything. Images borrowed from ones that @Chohole has littered all over the forum for informational purposes. Gotta love our great mods! :)
Thank you KnittingMommy! That was exactly what I needed!
Ah, you're very welcome! :)
Here's something a little different for the Book Covers crew to mull over. This is a WIP cover for a game book that is going to be released in February 2017 at a game convention in Houston, Texas. I will be selling it as a companion to my historical miniatures game, Gutshot. As such, here's a few things you should know:
So, why am I showing and telling you this? I wanted you guys to see how I was tackling issues like the placement of an akward logo (the logo was originally designed for a different purpose -- to appear in the corner of a page, not the center of a book cover -- but the logo can't be changed. I also wanted you guys to see how I chose to handle fitting this look in with the original book, and the weird issues I'm facing with placing so much small text on he front cover. Normally, I'd agree that this isn't optimal when you're trying to sell a book via a thumbnail in an online catalog, but that's not the primary mode of sales, so different approaches are called for.
I love the design. Small point: shouldn't it be "posse" not "posee" on the top cover?
I like the new cover. It has the same feel and flavor of the previous cover which should appeal to those who know the look and appeal to those who are new customers as it looks fresher. I actually looked up the old book as I was curious. I found a seller on Amazon selling a used copy for $59 and I think it was just the book. Then I found the hawgleg website with the books and all of the miniatures. They look really cool. Makes me wish I could get into that sort of game but I've never been a fan of the paper and dice games.
As for the cover, I like what you did with the logo. I'm not completely sure I like the text used for the editors' name, though. Is that the same text as used for the word Adventures? Because for some reason, it just looks odd in the red color if it is. I'm not sure exactly what it is that puts me off though I do like the red color as it fits well with the rest of the text. I think it is just that the font doesn't look good in red. Not sure if I really explained my thoughts on that well.
Funny you should mention the text for the editors' names... I'm not sure I like it, either. I may switch back to Georgia before going to print. But first, I need to color match the logo and the other text so it's all the same shade of red. That may resolve the issue (and I might make it bolder). And THANKS for looking up our game. I enjoy paper & dice games, but don't have as much time to play them as I used to. The thing I like about our game is that it's actually one I enjoy playing.
You are correct. This hasn't gone to my proofer (Paul, the guy mentioned on the cover), so he hasn't caught all of my mistakes yet.
Both Gunshot covers are stunning. The dominance of the thumbnail in book marketing now is getting to be a hinderence on interesting design, so its good to see work that isn't subject to it. Having said that, I think your layout and images are strong enough to attract interest in a thumbnail regardless of text, as it clearly communicates both genre and spirit.
Now I'm feeling nostaglic for the old role playing games I used to play - I think it's been about twenty years since I played one!
It feels like an age since I last had time to do anything much (I think six or seven months now) but I found some this evening. I haven't done anything dramatic - I just wanted to play around with doing underwater beasties some more. I hope to have some time again this weekend and may re-visit this theme then.
I absolutely LOVE your book covers! They make me want to go to the used bookstore and find some trashy novel like this and devour it over a weekend sipping beer and munching popcorn or chips.
The "Devil Fish!" cover is my favorite. What typeface is that? The "Primal Hunger" is good, but the bottom is just a little too dark and the center-level gator needs to be moved a smidge to our left so he's not crowding the title. These are spot-on recreations of an age gone by, and I'm seriously thinking of using this style in an upcoming project. Thanks, as always, for sharing!
You know, you could always grab some dice and mosey on over to a gamestore on a Saturday for a quick game of something! :-)
I added all that pre-amble just to make the point that the thumbnail-driven approach is very valid in today's marketplace, but it is a hinderance to general design. Thumbnails do play a part in my marketing (hence my choice of strong images), but that's not usually the way people shop for genre games. Most of the sales come through word of mouth, and then it goes to the next group which is comprised of gamers researching a particular genre or time period they are interested in. So, by the time they are looking through an online catalog, they are often already primed to buy. And that's when we get to much larger cover images for them to scroll through. Anway, enough of my rambling. I've gotta wrap up this image tonight, get it proofed tomorrow and out to the printers by Wednesday.
Hi, if you are looking for fonts for this sort of thing, then I would head over to the Scriptorium. The one I've used on Devil Fish is called Oblivion. The author name is in Ripley and the other text is Stonehouse. Primal Hunger (and you're right about the composition on that one but I rendered and just went with it - I like the theme though, so I will certainly be doing a new version, probably with a diver or body part) uses another favourite of mine called Shayne. Others I recommend checking out are Squiffy, Hamilton, Undertaker, Almanac, Bridgeport, Queensland, Ascelon, Cosmic Dude, Starliner, Startling Stories, Suspicion, Atkinson Plymouth, Guilford, and Guilford Crude. The cheapest way to buy them is in their bundles, though I've bought some on their own. The bundles I went with include Modern poster fonts, and the Pulp fonts. I certainly aim to pick up at least one of the Celtic collections for when I start on pulp fantasy.
Thanks for the list of fonts. I will certainly head over and look at them. I will actually be working on a pulp-themed comic, so some of these could be just what I'm looking for.
I am exhausted. I actually pulled a 28-hour "all-nighter" finishing my books so I could get them to the printers today. I absolutely must have them delivered to me by Feb. 9 so i can take them to a gaming convention. The bulk of that time was not spent on the cover (I had that done yesterday), but trying to get a fiddly installation of QuarkXpress 8 to actually process the high-resolution PDFs. I kept getting memory errors (that hadn't shown up during the proofing phase) where it was crashing while trying to flatten images with transparencies (I had to recreate every problem page as a full-page TIFF. That's what I get for listening to Quark and trying to use transparent PNG elements instead of setting everything up in the "old-school" way (i.e. full-page background TIFFs with the text overlayed in QuarkXpress). And that was just for the new book! When I made a few small updates to my old book (it was originally reprinted in 2006, with its last content update in 2013), all of the danged image links were broken and I had to manually reset them. Most of the time, if you fix one image in a folder, it finds all the others and updates them at once. But at about 4 am that stopped working and I spent two hours with the "Usage" utility going image, by image, by image, by image (there are about 250 separate graphic elements, photos and illustrations in this book). And once I finally had everything ready, the file transfer utility was peforming at a glacial pace (I was using SendThisFile.com because the printer didn't send me the FTP info until around noon today, and by that time even the last file was about 95% done, so I just let it finish).
Oh well, enough venting (thanks for your patience). I got all three books to the printers (there are two versions of the Showdowns & Shootouts book: color and b&w), and tonight I'm having nachos and a mararita. Probably two margaritas.
And when my computer stops acting up, I will upload a copy of the final book cover for you guys to see.
BTW: I normally don't include links, but if anyone would like to see some sample pages of the Gutshot book (just to see what I mean about there being 250+ separate gaphic elements and such), there are some sample pages available here at our Website: www.hawgleg.com/downloads.asp).
Congratulations on getting that done - it's no small accomplishment. It's been a long time since I did any serious typesetting (I worked with PageMaker, which tells you how old I am!) and know that it's a lot harder than many folk think. I hope you are enjoying a well earned rest and look forward to your next post.
I thought I would do another version of the Primal Hunger title, as I wasn't all that happy with the previous composition. I've made a little mistake on the text but it's just for fun, so I'm probably not going to correct it now. Anyway, I thought I would continue with the the underwater stuff for another couple of covers before I turn my attention to trying out some land based dinosaurs next week.
I'm guessing this finally uploaded (I've been having problems for two days with uploading to Daz). Here's the cover (I hope). Ugh. Still didn't make it. I'll try again later.
@philebus Those covers are wonderful! The aging looks So Real! Awesome work!
How did you get them to look like illustrations?
I've give up trying to post the cover here in this discussion thread. I finally posted it to my gallery:
More great covers for books I would LOVE to read. I do think the text in the upper part of The Trench should be the same yellow/green of the title, though. Right now it's a bit hard to read because it washes out.
Excellent as usual, Mike. Nicely done.
A really stunning job with these and the black over brown over aged vellum is great combination that you've used to its full potention. Now I'm going to look forward to seeing you do more comic book work.
I think you're right. I've been getting lazy, which is not a good habbit, even if it is just for fun. I think I will go back and correct this and other mistake for the sake of a little pride :)
It's actually a lot easier than you might think. There's also more than one way to go about it. I will try to find time to do a complete tutorial for this sometime but for the moment, here's a quick rundown of the method I used for these.
First of all, I would say don't use a fancy render engine - so no Superfly for Poser users, and no Iray for Studio. For the underwater scenes, I render againt a transparent background (so no fancy lighting either - keep it simple and dramatic, using one or two lights only) and I make sure that I render out a depth map (I'm not sure how that's done in Studio but I'm sure that I've read of people using them, so I'm should be a way to do it). I also make a line render in addition (this is in Poser Pro but again, I'm sure there is a shader solution in Studio). In a photo editor (I often switch between Photoshop Elements and Gimp) I have a little play, making the depth map into a mask for the render and using the contrast and brightness to determine how much is solid or fading.
Next job is to save this as a png with transparency and then I fire up ArtRage - this is a lot cheaper than Painter and very easy to use. In new document dialogue I add my png as a trace image, taking the document size from that. I also choose a rough canvas. First I create a new layer and then, with that selected, on the trace image menu, I convert tracing image to paint. This reproduces the tracing image on the new layer and treats it as though it was oil paint. Going to the botom layer, I then paint the background and work that over with the palett knife until I'm happy. Finally, I merge the layers and start on my rendered image with the palette knife, working it into brush strokes and blending with the background as needed.
Back to the photoeditor. Now I add the line render with multiply and delete most of it - I just want to pick out some detail here and there that might have been lost in the paint work.
Over all that (sometimes beneath the linework), I make a new layer and fill that will a solid colour, green or blue as needed, and then reduce the opacity and merge. Once all the text is in place (Photoshop Elements is a bit rubbish at this, so I always use GIMP for the text), I can then make a flattened copy (there are better ways of doing that but I'm really, really, lazy), and then another copy of that. To the topmost of these, I add a halftone effect and then reduce the opacity to about 7-8%. flatten again and now I add a layer of faded scratches. This would be fine from print but I like to add some serious wear and tear for display. This needs a little preparation.
You'll need to find a couple of old paperbacks with dark covers and a lot of wear. Scan them at a high resolution and then spend a fair bit of time cutting out those edges to make a frame you can layer over your cover. Add in some creases using some brushes and a layer of stains and you're good to go.
That sounds a bit long winded now I read it over but it isn't in practice. Like I said, I'll try and do a proper tutorial sometime.
Before I finish, I'll just mention on of the alternatives so you won't have to leave your photoeditor. You'll need to use some filters for this one. Start with Cutout and then Drybrush (GIMP does have a Cutout filter but I warn you that it is slow - at least on my ancient computer). Then create a new layer with the result and work it over using the smuch tool using a bristle brush, perhaps reducing the opacity a little. This is how my earliest pulp covers were done and while I prefer to use ArtRage, I'm still very happy with some of those old images.
@philebus Very cool book covers! :) Love the little tutorial, too.
@philebus Awesome! Thank you so much for the tutorial! I'm looking forward to trying out these techniques! I took screen shots of your post and saved it in my tutorial folder. :)
I'm really looking forward to the more in-depth tutorial as well! :D