More Cover Fun

Every once in a while, I make a little progress on redoing the cover for The Chaos Job. It's a wacky, heartwarming SF romp involving people stuck on a planet in the middle of nowhere, with damaged AIs, homicidal sheep, forbidden gods, and a bit of romance.

So... Having said that, here's the current cover:

I am absolutely not complaining about the cover designers I paid to do this, because they did exactly what I told them to do. It looks professional, which at least gives it some credibility. But I don't think it's attracting the right audience.

As we all know, I've never lacked in self-confidence, so sure, I can totally do this myself! And this was part of the reason I was trying to get more comfortable using Daz3D back in February.

This is the first iteration:

As a first pass (and not rendered fully), I think it's a good start. Some things that I will bang my head against the wall about:

• Lighting (sigh) It's all blown out. 
• Her hair. I really am going to have to bite the bullet and pay for better hair.
• Ha ha, I just noticed there's a chicken in the middle of the wheel. (Actually, that's kind of funny and totally a thing a chicken might do, so I'm tempted to leave it.)
• There needs to be less ground and more sky. Plus, I think I need to angle it so there's less of the building on the right.
• The dark thing in the sky is a spaceship, but it's totally not obvious. Probably I need to use a different background image than this, or at least move it over so the back of the spaceship is visible.
  
  
  
  
  
• The sheep needs something darker behind it for contrast.

So, yeah, lots to fix. But I think the vibe is a little closer. And I need to figure out why it created a 9000x10000 image when I asked it to render 1600x2560. Clearly, I'm missing something, and when I fix that, it will probably render faster.

Debugging Hardware

As part of my master plan to embarrass myself as thoroughly as possible diversify my income streams so I can earn a living, I'm going to try recording the audio for my books. It's entirely possible this will not work at all, but it's worth a try.

So here we have it — my recording studio!

If it looks a lot like a closet, that's because it is a closet. If I'd used the master bedroom closet, I would have had more room, but then a) I'd have to move all my clothes out, and b) I'd be trying to record five feet away from my neighbor's A/C which is always on from May until November.

So I'm using the closet in the office, which doesn't leave much room, but it should be okay. I may have to relocate the cockatiel on days I'm recording, but it's pretty quiet in there with the doors closed and a blanket draped across them. (It does heat up pretty quickly, though, so I'll have to take that into account.)

Today was my first attempt to hook everything up, and I spent a frustrating half hour trying to figure out why the microphone was producing such terrible recordings. I'd gone in with the plan of playing around with the position and angle of the microphone (which isn't super expensive, but it's decent quality), but when I played it back, I could just barely hear my voice and nothing I did made a difference.

Finally, I realized the recording software wasn't even using the new microphone. It was using the crappy microphone on the laptop three feet away. (Lesson learned: hook up all the hardware before starting the software or it won't connect to it!) After that... I'm hoping my reading ability improves quickly. At least the audio quality was better.

Will this be a complete waste of $275? Only time will tell.

Obligatory Pet Photo

My note on the Slack channel two days ago: "These babies are literally standing in the food and screaming up at the sky because they are hungry."

This is Why Professionals Cringe at my Efforts

I mean... I think it looks better with a drop shadow. I think my main problem is that the light is coming from different directions in all three images. (Scratch that — my main problem is I'm not a visual artist. But whatever.)

New version:

Previous version for comparison:

This is Why Professionals Get Paid

Here we have an example of two steps forward, one step back.

The dragon still isn't working, but you can definitely see it better, so... I don't know. Maybe I'll look for a different dragon that isn't so monochromatic.

Fading out the bottom makes the text much more readable. I opaqued the bricks slightly, but it's hard to tell I did it.

Oh well. It's an interesting exercise. And honestly, this is better than a significant percentage of the urban fantasy covers out there.

Here's the new version:

And the previous one for comparison:

Crowdsourcing Art Knowledge

No, this is not about machine learning (which isn't artificial intelligence, no matter what they keep calling it). This is more basic.

I turns out I know nothing about visual arts. The last time I learned anything was in kindergarten when they told us the primary colors were red, blue, and yellow, and then I became a programmer (uh, there were a few years in between) and found out they changed the rules and the primary colors are really red, blue, and green. My life has been a lie.

So mostly I do things in GIMP (because I'm too cheap to pay for Photoshop) and click on buttons and add layers and choose "colorize" and try every filter that exists and hope it all looks good. That either works or I give up and do something else.

But I know other people know what's going on and do these things with intention. So my question here is:

How do I make this look better?

The final cover will look something like this:

I need to go back and darken the bottom of the image so the text stands out, but first I need to fix the disappearing dragon. And maybe other stuff...

The image is made from these three pictures I licensed from DepositPhotos: a brick wall, a person, and a vector dragon.

The dragon completely fades into the background.

I'm guessing I need to... desaturate the brick background before adding the person and the dragon? Is that the term I want?

If I can figure out the right terms, I can find a video on YouTube that will tell me how to fix this.  I hope.

Quick Break For Very Important Info

I've been busy doing stuff (hey, someday I'll get this book in shape!), but I just wanted to say that there are five absolutely adorable kittens on the kittencam, so if you were waiting for new fosters, this is your chance!

(4 boys + 1 girl, no names yet, and they're about 5 weeks old)

Totally Rocking It Here

So now that I've learned everything there is to know about DazStudio (pause for laughter), I've decided to inch my way toward my real goal, which is creating new covers for my Jackpot Drift series.

(I'd like to reiterate: the company I paid to create the original covers did exactly what I told them to do, and those covers are fine. But I think they give the impression of written-by-a-man-all-tech-and-no-character-development-sf, which is exactly the opposite of what I need and may be scaring off my target audience.)

As much as I dislike character-based covers, I think I need to have them for this series. My vision is a woman's back as she looks into a valley filled with cyberpunk-ish buildings, sheep, bicycles, and a spaceship in the sky. If I can create that, I think it will give readers all the clues they need.

It's very possible I will decide I'll never have the skills to create this. And that's okay. But I'm going to start iterating in that direction and see how it goes.

Yesterday, I created a rock.

Before you laugh, you should know that I had to learn about Blender, an entirely different program, in order to do this. DazStudio lets you incorporate a bunch of objects and set up lights and cameras. Blender allows you create those objects. (That's my basic understanding, which may be totally wrong. All I know is that DazStudio primitive objects are one of: cube, sphere, cone, toroid, plane, and that wasn't good enough.)

Anyhow, like I said, I created a rock. Behold my rock!

And here is my rock (multiplied by 10) in the growing scene that may eventually be the book cover:

Baby steps!