Cover Art (Day 5)

Okay, so after I posted the entry yesterday, I remembered that I'm in a FB group where people can go to ask for help when making covers. I posted this image and said "Hey, how do I do something like this?" and they were very helpful.

Mostly I just needed them to tell me what words to search on, and so I can figure this out the next time I want to do so: bevel. There was also some discussion about lighting which went way over my head (which may be a reason for me to pay someone else to do this, but... whatever).

Anyhow, this is what I finally did in GIMP:

• On the layer with just the caduceus, Filters->Decor->Add Bevel...
• Save the bumpmap
• Then activate the layer to make bumpy, and Filters->Map->Bumpmap... and click on the Aux Input section.

(Now that I've written that out, it's clear why I never figured this out on my own.)

So I tried this in a couple of different places just to see how it stands out. It's in this image twice — once at the bottom and once in the dog's forehead. I think it's too subtle in the forehead, so I'll either need to put it on a fairly static area or work on making it stand out more.

Anyhow, Route 8 also had a suggestion about layer opacity yesterday, so I may play around with that tomorrow.

(But I also wonder how it would look if I did the whole dog's head embossed. Yes, I am about to fully fling myself over the edge into Way Too Much, but I have to fill 28 days somehow...)

I also downloaded a more recent version of GIMP today and it's so much easier to select things when you can see the selection markers! It was a thing that broke when I got my new laptop and I kind of forgot about it.