Hi all! This is a special treat for me, because today I get to share with you the new book cover art I created for book two of the Fireflies story, Fireflies: Pupa, written by Dreemsteem. So far, this is the second collaboration with Dreemsteem, who turned out to be a great client and friend. If you haven't read these short novellas, you're missing out. She really knows how to spin a tale. You can pick up your copy of the first book here at: Scribl Publishing
Dreemsteem found my blog here on Steemit and liked the work. A connection was made and I got lucky enough to become a small part of the Fireflies series by helping design some covers. The rest, as they say, is history. lol.
Anyway, this cover was created for book two in the series; and this is a small breakdown of how it was made:
First, Dreemsteem wanted to show another main character, Bryd. Currently, (no spoilers) he wasn't quite human anymore..... "Can you make a spirit like character?" she asked.
"Don't know?" I said to myself. Never tried. But I did have an idea, and Dreemsteem is very good at describing what she is looking for in her cover art. Sooo, I got to work, and here it is:
First, I went to my trusty 3D software, DAZ Studio, and brought up a male character. This had to be a ghostly figure, and the colour of essence,.... bluish? SO I removed all colour from the character and painted it a sky blue colour, adjusting the lighting to get a good brightness on the face and body.
I then took the rendered image into my Pixelmator image editor and went to work. I used a combination of smoke and ash Photoshop brushes designed by Deviney. They can be found on DAZ3D.com. I use a lot of his brush sets, cause frankly, they're the best, and was designed for designers to use commercially. I started to use the brushes to erase, at different opacities, parts of the main character. I then switched to paint mode and started adding etherial smoke to the image to portray a fluid whisper of a form. This took several hours to get right. Again, trial and error make for great results if you got the patience. This was the first draft of that work:
Not bad... but after some discussion, it was decided that the eyes should be less sinister and more Bryd. Soooo,
All that was needed now was a good background. I decided to use an image from Pixabay.com, free for commercial use. I can't express this enough, never use any material, images, or any other tool in your artwork that you don't have the commercial rights to. You may make the image completely unrecognizable, but if you don't have the commercial rights to use the image, or to use the special tool in your box of tricks, then you're steeling another artist's work. Plain and simple.
I blurred the image, then put an emerald green overlay and a black overlay over it to create a good starting point. From there, more brushes of smoke, light, pixy dust, fireflies, sparkles of colour, and a whole lot of other stuff thrown in for effect. To get an idea of the work flow, here's a gif:
And there you have it, another cover done. Can't wait to start on the next one! And here is the final version:
There you have it, thanks for looking. And if you haven't read the books yet.... GO GET THEM! lol.
PS:
Big thanks to Dreemsteem for writing a great story and giving me a chance to create some art. Pleasure working with you!
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