Commissioned Cover 1, part 2 - Viking Visual Art Tutorial

Last time, I showed you my progress on a commissioned cover for @iamraincrystal. I got it to a point where I was able to give her several options at two different points... the clothing and the pose.

She gave me her thoughts to those questions - both of which were easy to remedy. But then she said that she didn't like that heavy gun and wanted something like a Colt instead (thinking along the lines of the TV show, Supernatural.)

Uh oh.

I didn't have a gun like that... So, I went and hit the stores I use... DAZ 3D's store, Renderosity... nothing - not for free anyway. There was a "maybe" in the $10 range. Finally at ShareCG, I found a freebie from an artist I've used before (known as Ghastly.)

You can see the outline of the old gun - and simply putting the new gun in the same spot isn't going to cut it... A complete repose of her hands is required.

This is where I realized that my knowledge of guns is pretty poor and I asked @jamerussell to give me some pointers. He's familiar with DAZ, but more importantly, familiar with guns and what kind of defensive posture this lady needs to have.

He taught me about gun alignment and where the hands should be and things like that.

So, I went back and repositioned the gun and her hands (again) - taking more care with getting the correct lines and everything. Finally came to this:

(This is when @iamraincrystal told me that the lady is brunette - with green eyes... Okay, fixed.)

Rendering was fun because I needed to produce a sunset-like lighting that gives the lady the right amount of definition to her features... Plus, the hair kept looking plasticky (a problem in older hair pieces - which evidently included this one.) So, I have a few problems to solve before I finally let a render finish (probably 8 or so failed tries before I let it finish.) And went to bed. (Since my renders frequently take 2 hours of 100% of my best computer's CPU, I can't do much else on the machine while it's working.)

Here's what I got up to:

There's a lot of 'right' in this picture... I love the shadows, particularly. But those shadows told me (on close inspection) that the fingers on her left hand were not making contact with her right hand... It doesn't look so bad here, but I felt the need to fix it. (I also had to check whether my oversight of lack of jewelry or makeup was a problem - it wasn't, thankfully. There are makeup sets out there, but I don't have any good ones for this Genesis 8 female.)

I corrected the fingers and did another render...

I think this one took about an hour, not bad. i'm much happier with her hands. (The black background here is simply how .jpg interprets "transparent" and won't affect the final product, which I'm using .png for.)

I'm actually pretty good on my time estimate... I've probably spent three hours at this point (not including render times) and just have to put the image on the background and finish up the cover. Yeah, probably another hour or so.

Off to get the next stage done so that it's ready when she wakes up...

All work done by myself on Daz 3D Studio (screenshots processed on Gimp.)

Past A'mara Books tutorials:

Map Development for Alacantis (on GIMP), part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4
Cover image for Acting the Part
Cover image for Brighid's Blood (part of the update).
Cover image for Birth of the Neví, part 1, part 2
Map Development for Velantia, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4
Map Development for Kranisis, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4
Cover Image for Name of the Neví, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6
Beginning with Daz 3D Studio - my cover image for Mind of the Neví: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, changes
Cover image for Game of the Neví, part 1, part 2, part 3
Cover image for Pawn of the Neví, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5
Cover image for Freyja's Fire, part 1 , part 2 , part 3 , part 4 , part 5

Lori Svensen
author/designer at A'mara Books
photographer/graphic artist for Viking Visual
(Buy my work at RedBubble, TeePublic, PicFair and DeviantArt.)
verified author on Goodreads
(Buy my books at Books2Read and at LBRY)
find me on Twitter