Cover Art for Sorrows’ Master

Cover Close-up

Cover Close-up – Click for Larger View

For today’s semi-weekly post, I wanted to let you enjoy a closeup of the Alex portrait on the cover of Sorrows’ Master. Alex is in glowing-eyes mode (good for standing out of the background). I, myself, enjoy staring into them. You might not mind it either. 🙂

The cover is my own artwork, 100%. Indie authors do sometimes have issues doing the cover art for their books–not everyone is also an artist. I’m just lucky that way–being an artist before I started writing.

Production Notes for the Cover

Alex is the Michael 4 human male model made by DAZ3D and used in Poser Pro 2014. He’s using two third-party textures, one just for those pretty eyes.

Alex’s clothing is also 3D mesh, as those who work in CGI can probably spot. The pants are “M4 Cyberpunk” from DAZ3D, but I created and textured his Victorian-style vest myself. *preen* If you use Poser, you can get it either from Renderosity Free Stuff, or from my base site, Cool Tuna Studio (sort of the mother ship of all my madness). The nifty watch is a Frolex, modeled by my dear friend Jim Farris.

I also created and textured the mesh for Sorrows myself.

The awesome thorns (that’s the Blood Line, which is a character of its own, pretty much) and the tentacle are both made by “Poisen” and available from the Renderosity Marketplace.

I posed Alex and his duds, and then exported him from Poser into Vue 2014 Infinite. Ditto the thorns and tentacles. Or maybe I used the extra OBJ files? I forget. Same effect. This was all posed in Vue, lit, re-textured, and test-rendered to death (like, dozens of times). Vue executed the final render at about 3500 pixels tall at 72 dpi. I’m not going to print this on paper anytime soon, unless someone really wants me to, so no need to render at a higher dpi.

Finally, I took the rendered results into Photoshop CS6. There I did color adjustments, added glows and sparkles and suchlike. I painted the hair, too. You can use transparency-mapped modeled hair, but none of it is going to look as nice and arbitrarily flow-y as digitally painted.

There Will Be Prizes

And then I added the Cthulhu runes down the side. What do the runes say, you might wonder? I used a Cthulhu runes font, but it’s in English. If you can guess what the runes actually say in English, I’ll have to figure out a prize for you! Hell, I’ll send you homemade cookies. Deal? 🙂

Thank You, Steve!

And now a shout out to my long-time and long-distance friend, Stephen Hickman. I could only hope to be one-quarter the painter he is. Damn, I know someone with their own Wikipedia page! Anyhow, Steve was very kind to me when I could barely figure out what end of a brush to squish onto a canvas, and gave me advice that has stayed with me ever since. In this case: Grab their attention, then give them something to look at. Thus with this artwork: fun to examine up close. Enjoy!


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