I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel for my cover design for a friend’s new book. I have never designed a book cover before, so this has been a learning curve for me on many fronts.
Firstly, I abandoned my attempt to use oils to paint the cover – my preferred medium – in favour of painting digitally, using photoshop. I was pleasantly surprised by the control and the outcome of the initial portrait I produced using a wholly digital approach.
I have enjoyed experimenting with the new mixing brushes in Photoshop CS5 – with the help of Lynda.com. The use of ‘textures’ is helping me with my background for the project and, hopefully, the writer will be happy with the completed work. I still have some tweaking to do with the background and still have one, very important, character to add to the picture, but it’s looking good now and I have a new lease of life after a rather stagnant period of uninspired uncertainty.
I think that this situation was caused by the inexperience of both the writer and myself - some positives can be drawn from the whole process for both of us. I am now using the project as a catalyst for learning more about the software and techniques to produce digital paintings.
Another positive – whilst searching for information on digital painting, I found a video of a fine-artist-come-digital-artist who used 3D software to reconstruct a town that had disappeared in order to paint pictures of it as it had been in the early 20th century. I found this technique amazing and am now looking into using it in my own practice – more learning! At least I have a little experience of using Maya to help me start this new process.
I’m off now to continue working on my book cover – will check in when I have something concrete to show you (don’t want to post a picture until I’m happy with the outcome).
Till the next time…
May
