Mock Cover Art Fun!!! :D

Have you ever hit a low point in your writing life, where you feel like you just can't type another word?  That's where I was a few days ago.  Then, as I was browsing through the blogs I follow, I came across a post in which the writer had put up a mock cover design for the book she was working on.  It wasn't that bad, either: sure, it was only a photo that she had put text over, but knowing her type of writing, it really fit.  She said working on the cover design helped her focus when she felt like she couldn't write anymore.  The next time she hit a writing low, she said all she had to do was look at the cover art and her urge to write perked up again.

So I decided to try the same thing, and for the past 3 days whenever I could find time away from life and schoolwork, I've been working on this cover design for "Song of the Daystar".  Now that it's finished, I am really, really happy with the outcome.  In fact, to be quite honest, I wouldn't mind for this piece to be the REAL cover art for SOTD... with, perhaps, a few tweaks here and there.  (Whenever the book get's published, that is).  Here's a picture of my finished work; tell me what you think:

Most of this was done with photo manipulation, but there was A LOT of painting involved too.  The sphere is (of course) the Daystar itself.  This piece is actually from a scene that is in the middle of the book, where Curron (my MC) first touches the Daystar and suddenly the stone comes to life with power, and Curron has a vision of the Creation.  Birds, deer, and water are all mentioned in the scene, so I wanted to try to depict that in the cover art as well.  

The scene in the stone is pretty much all photo manipulation with the deer, the birds, and the water all coming from different photos that I worked into the background with GIMP.  It took me a while to get the color just right for the scene in the stone, but I worked in three different layers and finally got it the way I wanted it: the bottom layer was set to normal, the second layer up was set to burn, and the next layer up was set to normal, and then put at 40.0 opacity. 

The hands were done slightly different.  They started as a photo manipulation of a free stock image I got of the internet, but then I decided to paint over them entirely because I liked the painted look much better than the photo cropped look.  So basically the hands were all re-painted using GIMP.  It was difficult to get them to look just right, and I've never been very good at painting hands, but I think they turned out pretty good.  Especially with the hight lights coming off of the Title letters, and the slight purple shading (yes, I'm gloating just a little bit, but I really am proud of this accomplishment... the picture turned out way better than I expected it to.  ^_^ ).

So anyway,  please let me know what you think of it.  I'm so excited!  Now I feel like I need to go write!!!!

Something Totally Unrelated to What We've Been Talkin' 'Bout...

Ok, so I know we've been talking about the Great Publishing Debate, and believe me... this theme WILL continue for a while.  But right now I'm at a bit of a "pausing" point.  I'm interviewing some people, but it's taking a while, so while we are waiting for that, I thought I'd share my latest digital painting, titled "Rejection".

"Rejection" was painted using Gimp and my wacom tablet.  It was created for The 100 Theme Challenge that I decided to take on www.deviantart.com.

I've been working on skin tone and coloring a lot lately, as well as highlighting and shadow, and trying to make my subjects appear more "solid".  I've been getting much better with that: working with human forms has helped, of course.  The thing I've recently been playing with are the different colors that skin tone consists of.  If you'll notice, there's some green, blue, purple, and a little gold in his coloring.  Plus the ice blue highlighting.  I like the effect.  This painting was done using a reference, not something I use a lot when I'm painting digitally as it is, essentially, a pain to my eyes.  When I using graphite I use references all the time, but it's different when you have to split your computer screen up so that you can see both images, and my computer screen isn't all that big.

Well, that's all I have to say for now about this.  Let me know what you think in the comments.

As a warning, Deviant Art is a website dedicated to the visual and literary arts of people everywhere, and as such can present some immoral content if one is not very careful where and how one searches the site.

It is Finally Finished

At the beginning of the fall semester last year, as I was just finishing Song of the Daystar and getting close to test time, I suddenly discovered the wonders of Adobe Photoshop.  Now, I know that Photoshop is ideal for editing and fixing photographs, but in the art world, it is also a major step towards digital painting.  I have recently been experimenting with digital painting.  It's not nearly as easy as most artists make it look.  But after a while I got the hang of it and started working on a project called "The 100 Theme Challenge".  (No, this was not my original idea.  I found it on Deviantart.)  The challenge is to create 100 pictures in any media that you want, in any order that you want to create them, based on the themes given to you.  Since I had been wanting to explore the world of digital painting, I decided to try and do most of my pictures in the computer.

Unfortunately, about half way through painting the picture, my computer did a nose dive and I had to replace it.  When I went to install Adobe to finish the painting, for some strange reason the software wouldn't install.

But this didn't deter me.  I had been hearing some good things about a freeware art program called "GIMP" that could be downloaded straight off the Internet.  I ran it through my school's security software before installing it on my computer.  To my great and ecstatic surprise, GIMP is actually a decent art program.  The majority of the picture was done in GIMP.

The first theme I decided to do was #92, "All I Have".  I apologize now that the colors seem a bit light.  After I finished the picture, I went to print it off at Wal-Mart and discovered that my new computer's Gamma must not be set correctly.  I'll have to go back in, re-set the gamma, and eventually adjust the color.  But until then, here it is.  If you click the image below, a bigger version will appear, and if you double click that version, an even bigger version will appear.  I strongly suggest looking at the biggest version.  I put a lot of work into this painting, but it's hard to see when the picture is so small.

The Artist and the Writer

This is a subject that doesn’t get addressed often enough, I think. I mean, give me a show of hands, how many of you writers out there believe you have some talent in visual arts? Visual being the key word in this instance, not literal.  Maybe some of you do, and that's great!  *thumbs up*

From what I’ve heard tell, though, there are a lot of writers out there who believe they are also amazing artists. Don’t get me wrong! They are artists in the craft of words… but sometimes – sometimes they’re not so great with a pencil and a sketchpad.

On the other hand, there are artists out there who think they are also writers. (Believe me, I know a few). They are so sure they can capture with words what they capture with paint when, more than half of the time, it just isn’t so.

And yet once more, there are those few people who really are talented in both areas. They’re very rare, it would seem… and yet they're not quite as rare as many think. In fact, if anyone reading this has a Deviant Art account, or would just like to browse the site, they might find several talented artists who are also talented writers and vise versa.

I guess it all depends on who you think you really are. If you really believe you are both, then what’s stopping you from being both? So you struggle with the visual aspect of art: take a few art classes, learn some stuff, keep practicing. You’ll get it. So you have trouble fitting words, sentences, and paragraphs together in a smooth flow; take some writing classes, go on line, read, study… it’s not like rocket science. Really anyone can learn to do these things! And when I say anyone, I mean anyone.  It just takes practice, as every action or talant does.

And of course there are those writers/artists who can do miracles with photo editing! (I’m still a baby in that area.)


Me though? I actually fall into the category of both. Yes, I’m a writer and an artist. And also a musician. Those are my three strengths. Some people are like that too (especially if they’ve been playing an instrument since they were young – which I actually haven’t had the pleasure of doing... just since I was 14.)


What? Don’t believe me? Here, I’ll give you a few examples of my artwork:

These are just a few of my favorite pieces (I have more faves, but I thought this post might get too long, so I decided not to post them yet.)
 
So what are your tallants?  Share them with me!  It be awesome to hear about them.  :)