Creating a New Disaster

I've been working on narrating the audiobook for Shift Happens off-and-on for the last few months. Let me tell you, this is the first time in my life that I've been really sorry I've never acted in anything. But that's not the point of today's post.

It occurred to me recently, that I need to have a cover for the audiobook. I have a cover for the ebook:

It's fine, but

1. Audiobook covers are square instead of rectangular (because of course they are, dammit), which means I would need to go back to the original designer and pay another $60, and
2. I really wish the dragon on the cover didn't look quite so much like a demon (but not so much that I'm willing to pay an artist to do it differently).

I've learned some stuff in the last few years, so I thought I'd make a stab at creating a new cover. It's very probable that I'll give up and just pay the $60 to get the square audiobook cover, but why not try a few things first?

So I bought a dragon. I went with the Millennium Dragon instead of the standard DAZ Dragon 3, because

1. The Millennium Dragon is $20. The other one would have ended up being about five times that after I added in all the other stuff I'd need so it wasn't pure white.
2. I just didn't like how demon-like the DAZ dragon is. I'm looking for more of a friendly dragon vibe.

I did a rough version of the render today to see how it would look and got this. (Pretend there's a background.)

I wasn't worried about the dang hair (which I've struggled with in DAZ before) because I knew I wanted to do a face swap. Have I ever done a face swap? No. But how hard can it be? I also made the dragon's eye blue so it would stand out more.

So this is my rough and dirty first version:

Things I want to improve in DAZ:

1. Add gloves so her hands don't look so weird.
2. Add a background (Maybe? Maybe I should just add a bunch of fire and fog afterward, similar to what's going on in the current cover.)
3. Change the lighting so it's coming from the left, just like the face
4. Figure out how to get rid of the bleb on the dragon's nose
5. Maybe move one leg forward on the dragon?

I'll need to do a bunch of post-processing in GIMP, but I need to get the render stuff right before I do that.

Sure. I can totally do this.