Victor Frankenstein
in many film versions of Frankenstein had to steal body parts
from graveyards for his creation. Like him, there are creeps out
there who feel they have to do the same with images when it comes to
creating their art, only they don’t go to graveyards but more so go
to websites. But there’s a legal and ethical way to grab the parts
you need in order to make your graphic creation and that’s by going
to public domain sources. That’s what I’ve been doing for the
photo-real book cover illustration for “Circa Sixty Years Dead”. To gather the images I need, I’ve been turning to
Pixabay.com. If you ever look at the images that I
display in my weekly posts here, that name probably sounds familiar
to you.
Pixabay is a really
great source for graphic projects, including book covers. All their
images are in the public domain and so you don’t have to worry
about copyright infringement. Their contributors have been so
generous with allowing free usage of their works that I tried
contributing one of my own colored-pencil drawings at Christmas but
it didn’t meet the website’s qualifications. I’ll have to find
another way to donate to them.
Well, as you can see
in the picture below, I’ve made a rough sketch, if you will, of the
book cover illustration. Therefore I’ve put together the basic
images I’m using to see how they look in composition. In this case,
those images are the temple ruin and the desert background. I still
have to add the goddess statue which I’ll put in front of the
temple like it is in the story. After I work with the placement of
the objects in the picture, I’ll add (and in some cases subtract)
the details such as darker tones for a night-time scene as opposed to
the afternoon one seen here.
 |
| Credit: Steven Arellano Rose, Jr./Pixabay.com |
So it won’t look
like a collage, I’m going to have to cut the edges of the
superimposed objects, such as the temple, and overlap the lighter
ground from the temple’s original picture with the darker desert
sands. Am I doing this because I hate collages? Far from it. I love
collages; they are so surreal and I love surrealism. But because this
is for marketing purposes and photo-realistic covers are in, I need
to make the scene look as real as possible. And I hate photo-real
book covers, at least when it comes to fiction. If you’re like me
and prefer touchy-feely art in your reading then head on over to
Amazon to purchase my hand-produced book cover illustration edition
of “Circa”.
I’ll go over more
about the book cover illustration and the photo-editing software I
use for it, Paint.Net, next time.
Until then . . .
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