A Psychochronography in Blue (Part...1)

There are many fictional conceptions of time. Quantum Leap postulated it was like a ball of string, many other shows and films conceptualize a river, with the future being down stream. Doctor Who simply says it's, well, 'timey wimey' (says it a lot actually, even I'm beginning to think it's getting old), but in the case of this post we can think of it as an Ouroboros; the serpent with it's tale in it's mouth. The end as the beginning.

While this is part one of this increasingly lengthy saga there is a part zero of a sort, you can read that here, and the posts for part 2, 3 and 4 if you click the numbers. The tangentially related A Golden Thread can be found by clicking its title. I highly recommend you do read part zero if nothing else - time travel is complicated enough without you skipping all the slow bits.

"Time can be rewritten" is a popular part of Philip Sandifer's TARDIS Eruditorum, and in this case it sort of has been.

In one version of history I created a speculative book cover for the first entry in the series based on his popular blog. He liked it, but already had another artist. She continued to work on his books for many years, while I went off and had a quiet life with the occasional portrait commission. That is not this version.

In another he liked the spec and hired me on the spot. The cover was a disappointment to me if not him and I declined the opportunity to continue ruining his delightful book series. That too is not this version.

In this version I failed to do the first cover, but got to do the second. Given what I had learned doing the spec for book one, as well as in the intervening time, I was quite pleased with the results. I have done covers for him ever since, with the Who ones being "themed" to a degree, but with volume one being a bit of an odd duck as it was in a completely different style by a completely different artist. Time to fix that, time to go back to the beginning.

You may note that this looks remarkably like the speculative cover I did two and a half years ago, but hopefully more polished and in a lighter blue (since one thing I've learned is that blue prints darker than you'd expect). This shouldn't come as a terrible surprise of course; I'd already designed it once, no point doing so again. Since I needed to make it print res anyway I thought I'd tweak it as I went along. Owners of the digital edition may note some small differences in the wear of the front cover - the explanation for that is further down.  By the way, as always in these posts you can click most of the images to enlarge them.

The reason the above image exists is all down to Phil wanting to expand Volume 1.  Initially this was to be just a major re-edit of one of the essays (due to the new availability of a formerly "lost" episode).  He felt that might not be financially viable, so tested the waters by dipping his toe on Kickstarter.  The resulting flood allowed him to purchase the scuba gear required to survive it, and also to not only add the essays he'd planned, but several others as well.  The new book is substantially revised and covers stories right up as far as the 50th Anniversary's An Adventure in Time and Space.

When he did the Kickstarter video it was my Spec image he used for the campaign.  He asked first of course, right before asking if I'd also revisit it for the actual cover.

The first thing I decided to do was to replace the front on image of the doctor with a more natural one, while also removing his hands from his pockets to be replaced by the more iconic hands on lapels pose. I needed to see if Phil agreed with this change, so I quickly traced a photograph of Mr. Hartnell at a small scale and ran it past Phil, with some other possible variations in shade in case he wanted it different. He didn't, and was very pleased I'd included the detail of his ring, as it's relevant to the book. You'll probably note that at this point I was still working with the darker blue of the spec cover. I knew I would need to lighten it up, but at this point I wasn't sure exactly how I wanted it, so I left it as was.

Once the style was chosen I needed an image to replace the traced one with. I felt that using an image directly traced from a photograph was most certainly pushing my luck, and furthermore it felt like a cheat. So I did a sketch including his head, which was a bit rough and ready, so I did a better sketch of his head separately. I'm really not sure why I bothered with his head (twice) since we weren't going to use it, but I think I felt the body needed a head, and then when I wasn't happy with it I wanted to get his likeness a little better. I turned this into a vector image after scanning it so I could scale it as needed for the cover. Like James Cromwell I thought "That'll do pig," but also decided to flip it to better match the composition before dropping it in.  Now it's to late to do anything about it I notice that flipping it has the monocle tucking into the wrong side of his waistcoat.  Ooops.

The ring is on the correct side though, so that's something.

Here's the in progress cover with a lighter blue and the new posed figure on the front. On the back is the sketch of Mr. Hartnell, and you'll see it migrate around a bit in the next image. I liked the idea of someone doodling in the head on the back cover, although in one version there's a different head sketched in pen (which is how I'd have to do it if I really wanted to do this as an actual sketch of Mr. Hartnell would be pushing our luck again) - Eventually I dropped the idea. Even though I like it I feel it's not really appropriate for the mainline series of books.

I also threw in a torn price sticker. This is actually the same price sticker I used on the back of volume 4, but with more of it intact. I thought having years of pricing stickers built up would be interesting and give some real age to it, and while I didn't quite do that I did do something similar. It's a sort of 'fake old book' trope I suppose, but one I liked and had held off doing until now (this was before I did the cover for volume 4). I really wanted a 'Blue Peter Bring and Buy Sale' sticker mark on there too (not the logo though, we'd be pushing our luck yet again - that mark isn't just copyrighted but practically sacred). I resisted the urge. There's always volume 5 for something, maybe a fake coffee ring instead (and before the cries of 'cliche!' ring out too loudly, I do in fact have book with a tea ring on it right next to me... I don't drink coffee).

In this set I'm just fiddling with the layout of the back cover, the amount of wear and tear and the tinting of the blue. Not terribly exciting, which is why I've stuck them into one image. The only thing of note is the method I've used to change the colors - a method that will only really work with this one. As well as the grime layers I have over the top of the image (along with the wear) I have a gradient colour layer which can be set to any gradient of colours I like. The image underneath is in greyscale, as seen in the sketch/vector image above. Using the gradient colour layer (It's actually called a gradient map), you can easily tint the greyscale to any selection of colours you wish. This made it very easy to get the range of blues I wanted to go with without having to individually tweak dozens of vector layers individually.

The last one is of course the final cover with the wrong blurb text on the back, and the spine being much wider than needed, allowing me to scale it more easily when the final page count came in. Print owners (or those looking at the top image) may note that the wear and tear is different to the final book, while digital readers will see it's the same as the one in their download. The reason for this is simple. Phil wanted to put the digital copy out early for his Kickstarter backers, and needed the front cover in a hurry. I snagged this one, and off it went. Then, when I went to do the print cover I realised that I'd somehow put the wear and tear for this book onto Volume 4 when that shipped and had failed to notice when I grabbed the previous digital copy.

This isn't such an issue with the digital version (though it is extremely embarrassing), but on the print version it would be highly obvious when both books are on the same shelf. Couldn't have that, just won't do. Fortunately, while I had accidentally replaced the wear on the fourth volume with this one, that meant that the wear originally intended for Volume 4 was still floating around. I went and found that (I often do the wear on a separate image before bringing it in onto the actual cover - in this case I'd pulled the wrong one into Volume 4's image, so all I had to do was pull Volume 4's (intended) one into this one. Confused? Yes, I was at the time as well.

So now here are two volumes where the Print and Digital versions have slightly different covers (the other being Volume 2 - the print says 'Philip', the digital 'Phil'). I'm okay with that, so long as one doesn't look substantially better than the other I guess. Phil didn't seem terribly bothered by it, and I guess that's the important thing.

I apparently had more to say than I thought.

One last thing... As with volume 4, Phil got a proof copy done, so here are some photos of the finished article.

Phil's post on the book launch can be found here.
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 1 (second edition) can be purchased here
Merchandise for the series is available here (Volume 1 mug and shirt coming soon)

Now, about the slightly unusual title - Really, I had to use that it, how can you ever pass up the chance to use a word like "Psychochronography"?

A Psychochronography in Blue (Part 4)

As is suitable for a TARDIS Eruditorum cover post the story begins in the past.  If you want to go right back to the beginning you can check out the previous posts for volumes 1 2 3 (click the numbers) and the tangentially related A Golden Thread before we continue.

But those are not the beginning of the tale of this book cover, except in the way that my parents being born is the beginning of mine.  No, this books gestation began way back in Phil's Blog, but the cover began back in June, when I had the idea for the cover.  Except it wasn't to be this book's cover, because both I and Phil both agreed it would make a better cover for Volume 5, and thus it shall be.  This left me lacking an idea for this book though, so I went to do some roughs, which after a surprisingly small number of adventures would eventually lead to the following.

As you can see, the style of the cover is quite different to the previous ones, and is suitable not only for the single doctor the book focuses on, but should also carry a very suitable vibe from that period of time.  It wasn't always that way though - I knew I wanted Jelly Babies to be the focus in some way, but I really wasn't sure how to get it.  Here are the roughs as I did them, you'll note the last one looks completely different to the others, and I'll get to why in a moment.

So, this is the first time anyone has seen these, including Phil.  I didn't send them to him because A) the rest are awful and B) I sort of knew he'd love the last one anyway.  Sure enough when I sent it to him he basically said "Hell yes that one" and he was amused (as was I) that it was a completely unsuitable cover for the Gothic Horror vibe that settles on Doctor Who during these years (goodness knows what I would have done if he'd hated it).

You'll note the other covers are also not terribly Gothic Horror - but they're not all that mid 70's either - that's why I do roughs; to work toward the feeling and vibe that I want.  Except in this case it was pointless because after the grinning silhouette cover I went and made a cup of tea and  saw the box for the tea bags. This made me think of how crap packaging is these days (Tetley tea, in America, has packaging that looks like women's sanitary products.  I kid you not), which made me think how awesome packaging used to be (design wise, not freshness wise), and then I knew what I had to do.  Something that evoked, but wasn't identical to, Jelly Baby packaging of the 70's.

To get the Jelly Babies for the last one I just traced the 3D one I'd sculpted for the one on it's far left.  Yes, I sculpted a Jelly Baby that looked a bit like Tom Baker.  I named him Jelly Baker.

I don't think I sent Phil the tiny thumbnail though, I think I sent him this one:

Which is basically identical, but I made it a bit larger.  Knowing that if Phil was going to like it I'd have to do the Jelly Babies again, I did them on a separate sheet as vectors - the only downside being that after scaling I had to rasterize them to get the lines (Don't fret if this means nothing - if just means there was an extra step each time I needed a different size baby, but I didn't need to redraw them all over again).  Here's the result of that - not that you need it, you can see the results in almost every image on the page.  Of course if I used Illustrator this would be a moot point, but I don't have Illustrator, so there.

So Phil signed off on it and I got to work on the larger cover.  I wasn't happy with the layout or choice of the fonts though, so I went to find something more suitable, and Phil wanted some changes in the choice of text.  Phil was also concerned that the wear and tear to the paper wouldn't be evident against the white, so I fiddled with the staining of the paper a bit, eventually settling on having it more stained than the 'white' of the design rather than less, as it worked better visually.

The font I settled on for TARDIS needed a little tinkering with to make it work for the text above it, but otherwise it all went quite smoothly.  The back cover was based on a book I have from the time period, although the border to the text and colours are different.  I also decided to keep the back cover mainly blue as I wanted the spine to be blue (as is the intention for the whole series, and always has been) and it looked odd having the spine blue, and then going back to white for the back cover.  This was finished back in early September, with the re-sizing of the spine and the replacement of the temporary rear blurb text being the only work still needing to be done.  Phil got me the final page count and rear text a couple of weeks ago, and that required some re-sizing of the spine elements. I took the opportunity to bulk up the title text there a little too.
All in all it was a very smooth cover, and despite it's simplicity I'm very pleased with it.  And that would usually be it, but this time there are a couple of caveats.

Firstly, this is the first Eruditorum cover available with a matte finish.  It's long been a minor irritation that the covers have to be glossy, as this breaks the aged illusion somewhat.  Not completely (I've fooled at least one person I've shown them to who didn't realised I'd designed them and wanted to know about "the old Doctor Who books on your shelf"), but enough that it's bothered me.  Createspace now allows Matte finishes, and Phil proofed this one with that in mind.  The results are apparently far better (I've yet to see more than  photograph), so any additional prints of the last two books will also be with matte covers - not A Golden Thread though - that one it all about the gloss.

The second caveat is that when Phil did his kickstarter for Volume One: 2nd Edition there was a stretch goal for merchandise.  Vol 1.2 isn't available yet (He was, quite reasonably, waiting to see what the 50th anniversary held before going ahead with it), but we've set up a storefront for when it is.  Up until yesterday it contained a T-shirt and some Mugs for volume 2 (my mug hasn't arrived yet, but my T-shirt looks great), but it made sense to do a mug and shirt for volume 4 to tie in with it's release.

For this I made a few small changes to the design.  Firstly I increased the number of babies on the image.  While I wanted the book cover to be bold and obvious, the associated products can be a little more obscure, and I like the idea of the 'Jelly Baker' being less overt in the image.  If you want an overt version there's both a mug and shirt available with just the Jelly Baker.

I've also put in the "Jelly baby?" question.  This isn't using an existing font, as I wanted it to be more reminiscent of the 70's Bassets Jelly Babies logo.  I found a font that was sort of similar and then modified it heavily to match the classic logo, without it being identical (The Capital B is lower case here for example).  The question mark had to be done from scratch, and I made it subscript to keep the lowercase feeling of the question (Having it higher made it feel more forceful rather than inquisitive for some reason).

Finally I decided to remove the wear, and that might be the case for many of these going forward (just the merch, not the book covers).  Convincingly wearing a book cover is relatively easy, as you have the entire area to work with, but for a Shirt or mug you just have the printed part, which is a small portion of the whole.  Hopefully my graphic skills are good enough that I don't have to rely on the aging for them to look good.

And that really is your lot, except for the links where you can buy all the goodies.

Phil's post on the launch is here (when it goes live in the morning at least)
The book is available here (there are more options in Phil's post too)
Mugs and T-Shirts available here

Slow Cooked Speed

I'll be honest up front.  Three of the speedpaints that follow pretty much stink.  Whether the other three do I leave to you to decide.  One thing is certain though; the relative quality of these things is usually based on the following:

1) Whether it's based on a photograph
2) How long it takes to do
3) Whether I'm using a technique or software I know well

If it's based on a photo, I took a little time over it, and I'm using tools I'm comfortable with, the results will usually at least be acceptable.  Anything else and quality becomes a complete crap shoot.  Worth noting for future reference I think.

Oh, and before we proceed to looking at pictures, you might wish to come back on Monday as well - I can pretty much guarantee another new post then.

Time Taken: 15 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4

So, given the time spent, the lack of reference and the unusual tool setup* I guess I'm actually OK with this one looking as it does.  There's potential here if nothing else.  Not much else to say - I just opened AR4 and started painting, this was the result.  I hesitate to say 'She was the result' because other than the lipstick and high eyebrows there's something very masculine about 'her'.  Oh, I guess I did have something else to say after all.

*It's the oil tool, which I'm used to in Studio Pro, but it works slightly differently in AR4, and it was set up in an unusual way.

Time Taken: 40 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4

This one is slightly better, but it also took almost 3 times as long.  Other than the time this had the same constraints as the previous picture - no reference, odd tool setup (I'm still finding my preferences in AR4).  The changes to the Oil tool between ArtRage versions are not huge, but seem to have a profound effect on how they feel to work with.  I'll keep plugging away at it for a while, but I'm still not comfortable enough with them to try anything really finished in AR4.

Time Taken: 75 Minutes
Software: ArtRage Studio Pro

This one on the other hand is disappointing given the three required items were in place.  It took over an hour, using familiar tools, and is based on a photograph.  Here's the step by step:

So yes, it's a nice enough picture, but I think I should be able to do a lot better.  I suspect I'll paint Robin Hood's bay again, or at least somewhere similar.  Nothing else to say here - I just like the picture and painted it.  Move along now.

Time Taken: 15 Minutes
Software: Black Ink

And keep moving along...

Oh, alright I'll say something.  I'd downloaded the trial of Black Ink as it seemed like it might be an interesting new tool to use, and while it certainly had some powerful features I didn't like the interface, and on my machine I found it slow and cumbersome.  This may not be the case on all machines (I need to update my graphics card after all), but it made drawing anything unpleasant.  I decided to try a speedpaint anyway and this is the result.  I might give it another chance before the end of the trial, but we'll see.

The image itself is based on a photograph I'd seen on Pinterest earlier, but is not referenced from it directly; just from my memory of it.  After 15 minutes I could see it wasn't going as I would like and gave up on it.  Simple as that.

Time Taken: 60 Minutes
Software: ArtRage Studio Pro

(Mild spoilers for the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special "Day of the Doctor" follow, if you've not seen it)

Back to the software I'm familiar with,and spending a bit of time over it and referencing  from a photograph (in this case a still captured from a TV broadcast).  I was watching the show and this shot appeared.  The first thing I thought was "Holy crap, that's awesome!" and the second was "I have to paint that!"  I have no means of capturing stills from TV though (I might get around to setting something up for that one day), so I had to nab one someone else had taken a couple of days later.  Here's the step by step:

Firstly I laid down the basics with the Palette Knife tool.  I'm not usually much good with it, and sure enough once I reached the 4th image here I decided to move onto something more familiar (I'll keep using the palette knife in future though - it was very useful for rapidly blocking out the main forms - I think it was only 10 minutes to arrive at that 4th image).  With the oil paint tool I finished off the rest of it.  I'm reasonably pleased with it, especially his left eye (the right one in the picture).  I loved the lighting and Capaldi's expression in the original shot, and I think I mostly managed to capture that here.

Time Taken: 125 Minutes
Software: ArtRage Studio Pro
Based on stock from NicklausseStock

This one ticks all the boxes, with two small things different to mix it up.  It's using software I know, based on a photograph and took a little over two hours to paint.  It might have taken less time, but I didn't choose the best time to paint it and got interrupted a few times (the time here is the time actually spent painting, rather than from the time I started to the time I finished which was more like 6 hours).

I'd wanted to paint this image of her for a while as I liked her expression and hair, but I kept putting it off.  I finally started it as this was the first photo that popped up when I was looking for something to paint.  I was using the oil brush tool in ARSP, which I'm very familiar with, but I was using the oval brush rather than the rectangular one.  These act very differently, and usually I use the rectangle as I find it more precise (the oval is very useful for hair though), so this was an interesting experiment for me.  I also did it on one layer, which is not terribly unusual, although I usually keep the background as it's own layer to make later touchups to it easier.  I'm quite pleased with the result, although it shares some common flaws with my other work (Her head is not turned enough, her body not angled enough, that sort of thing).

OK, that's all I have for now.  Come back Monday.  No, really, that's all, come back then...

Painting Class: Painting Still

Well, I'm sort of amazed how fast the last few months have gone by, and how little artwork I seem to have done in that time.  I was worried at one point that I was slipping back into the mode I entered that eventually led to the creation of this Blog - that of not being fussed to do any art, a state that lasted close to 10 years.

Thankfully though I am doing art - less than I probably should, but vastly more than I was during those 10 years.  The stresses of the last couple of months are wearing off too, so more is likely to be forthcoming.  After this post I have one more planned before the end of the month (possibly 2, but the other will be quite personal and have no art in it, so you likely don't care).  Which brings me back to this post, and why I'm commenting on how time has flown:  It's an art class post.

The last post I wrote on the subject was after my last class waaay back in August.  It doesn't seem that long ago, yet it was almost 3 months.  I started another class about 10 weeks ago and just finished it.  I didn't attend all 10 sessions (I think I missed 3), but I painted a reasonable amount in those sessions I did attend, and at home when I missed one of those 3.  As a result I have 5 new paintings of vastly differing quality. They are all on canvas board, painted in Acrylic, but the sizes vary.  Incidentally, all the photographs but one are from angles other than that at which I was painting as I took them as an after thought rather than during the process.

So this is the one I'm least happy with.  I'm not the worlds fastest painter, so I decided to leave out some of the objects you'll see in the photo for time reasons.  Even so, it took me two sessions (not counting setup and break down, that's about two hours a time), and looks really sloppy to me.  Here's the photo of the scene it's based on, from close to the same angle from which it was painted (I think I was looking down on it more).

So you can see I got the proportions way off the mark, and everything's a bit too bright in the painting. For all that though it's not a complete failure - One thing I didn't mention before is that all of these look better in real life than the photographs really convey, I'm just not very good at photographing them as yet.  So I'm quite pleased with the orange ball (actually an egg end on).  I'd painted the A being far to orange, which made it difficult to get the egg as bright as I would have liked, so I dulled it down at the last minute, to a poor result, but it does mean the egg stands out quite nicely, whereas it would have been lost before.  The cloth isn't bad either, especially compared to some of the later ones.

This second piece took three weeks, and is probably the best of those I did, even though I don't like it all that much.  All the pieces this time around were still life, which is fine, but it would have been nice to mix it up a bit (mind you, nothing was stopping me from doing just that if I'd wanted to work on something else instead, so it's entirely my own fault).  The image of the painting itself is a little washed out, the real colours are a little better.  Here's the photo of the scene.

So I'm not happy with most of the shapes.  The paint brushes are wobbly, the gear is squiff, the flower too blocky on the lower left and so on.  I quite like the can though, which is why I chose this particular scene (we had a choice of two).  At one point the flower pot was a much ruddier brown.  Paula (who runs the class) talked me into trying to make it closer to the actual, brighter, colour and I'm glad she did.  Here's a shot taken after the first session, where you can see the layout pencils and the less saturated brown of the flowerpot.

My mother wants to have this one, I really don't know why.

This one was painted the evening before halloween, hence the blood that was not in the original.  Actually, the photo below is probably the closest to the angle I saw the actual mask from, so you can see I made a bit of a mess of the perspective.  You can see that I've left out the things from the table itself - choosing to focus on the mask.

A better thing to do would be to have made the entire background blue, but I thought it would be a challenge to capture the silvered material.  Did an okay job I guess, and the whole thing took only 2 hours.  It's the one I like the most of the 5, even though it's not very accurate (working from life is a lot harder than working from photos, and I have a hard enough time doing that).

This and the next are quick value studies, and for this one I didn't lay out using pencils to begin with but went straight for the paint (similar to the way I do most of my speedpaints, but with, y'know, paint?).  The downside of this is that the composition is pretty weak, with far too much black space.  I also left out a small tower from on top of the cylindrical box.  Sadly this is the only one for which I don't have a photo of the original scene.  Despite the flaws, I quite like it - I think the pig turned out pretty well. as did the shadows.  The whole thing took only 40 minutes, aided by my not needing to worry about colour I suspect.

And here's the last one.  Another value study, but I wanted to have the tangerine be orange.  I did lay this out in pencil first, but mostly just with simple block forms so I could get on with the painting.  This backfired a little as the weights came out a little weak looking.

The proportions on the A are better than they were in the first picture, but it's still a little stubby.  This was mostly straight lines and circles, which are tricky to do with paint it seems (unlike digital stuff I can't just hold control and click the endpoint for a straight line).  I may need to make myself one of those painters straight-edges out of a bit of dowel and a sponge to help with the problem, although I was moving quick on this one and probably wouldn't have wanted to slow down anyway if I'd had one.  It took about 70 minutes I think.


And that's it for this post.  Hopefully I'll get another post up this week (month), and I'll certainly get one done for next.  You know, looking at those photos again, I wouldn't mind basing some digital work on a couple of them, they might turn out quite well.  Or I could try them again with real paint later, a reasonable gauge of progress perhaps.

A Psychochronography in Red, White and Blue

And here, sooner than planned, a new book cover.  This time though there's a twist - despite the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who being in less than a month, this is not a Doctor Who cover.  In one way it was far simpler than those, and in a couple of others gave me some pause for thought.

While not a Who cover, it is a cover for Dr. Sandifer (or Phil as he's known to his friends (I assume - I've never actually spoken to the good doctor except via i-correspondence (that's email to you (and yes, I did just do, and am still doing, a run on sentence with four sets of nested parentheses - hardcore). It's for his latest exploration into psychochronography, titled A Golden Thread: An Unofficial Critical History of Wonder Woman.

Which subject led to the first pause for thought: Given the legendary litigiousness of the US comics industry, how do you do a cover for a book about Wonder Woman without actually featuring Wonder Woman on it?

Read on oh truthful reader, and discover the answer, and more...

So there's the cover (clickable for enbiggability, as are all the images that follow) - Hopefully it inspires thoughts of an attractive raven haired superwoman, despite lacking any imagery of her (If I have done my job poorly than you may instead be expecting a political thriller set within the walls of the White House - it was a fine line to tread) .  How myself and Phil arrived at this is chronicled as follows.

It all began with an email from Phil saying he didn't need me to do the cover for this one.  This may strike you as odd, given that the cover is directly above, but in fact it wasn't odd at the time - he had an actual honest to goodness publisher interested - and while they might have been interested in Phil's words they were not interested in some part time wannabe cover artist.  This held no surprise for me, so I just got on with some Doctor Who ones that were bound to come in handy eventually.

Phil's publishing deal unfortunately fell through, and he mentioned some aspects of cover design of his now to be self-published book in some unrelated emails; it never went much further than that.  Then, at the worse possible time (see previous post) I receive an email with something along the lines of "I don't think I ever officially offered you the Wonder Woman cover.  Do you want it?"  Well, of course I did, so I got to doing some thumbnails - time was tight this time, the book was basically done, and just needed setting and someone to do the cover.

The top row were the first thumbnails I sent him.  With time being tight I didn't have a lot of time to come up with amazing ideas, so the results were a little limited compared to what I usually send him.  Nevertheless they provoked discussion, which was the important thing.  One and Five were dismissed immediately (I was secretly happy about this - they would have been very difficult to pull off in time), as was cover two as it held the greatest chance of us getting sued (though I think we were both sad about that - there was some real potential there.  Cover three was deemed worthy of further exploration, and Phil liked cover four because the stars evoked "A series of failed utopias" which is apparently a central theme of the book.  The stars are actually representative of the decades in which WW has been around (that's Wonder Woman, not Weight Watchers), but I'll take it, and decided to pursue the idea.

Second and third rows were the next round, all variations on a theme.  Phil immediately picked #3 and #5, the "misfit" stars being to busy on the other variations.  My personal favourite (#8) was rejected for being too bottom heavy - and to be fair I think in retrospect Phil made the right choice, as while it's still my favourite, it needed some curves to help evoke WW's femininity.  I really liked the star 'A' logo though, so decided to try that with the two preferred covers.  I also felt that the Misfit stars should go on the back rather than the front (sorry e-book-buyers, no Misfits for you), and so #5 was going to be a feature of the back cover either way.

The final row is of the last two revisions, each with the same back cover and a very rough idea for the spine.  Phil chose #1 (obviously), and again I think this was the correct choice due to the curves.  I had added a dark gradient to the cover to help Phil's name stand out along with the 'A' logo and a second curve to add a little more depth.  Phil never expressed his thoughts on these alterations - his email simply read "Number One!"

Before I received that email though I needed to ensure I  could do a reasonable looking gold at a much larger scale.  I decided to do it with the large star, since it was going to be present whichever cover was chosen.  I also had a go at adding the gold effect to Phil's name, and neither myself or Phil were happy with this first attempt.  The star was more successful though, but involved far to many layers for me to use the technique on the whole cover (even my recently upgraded PC has some limitations on it's memory).  I needed to come up with a better method that looked just as good (I kept the big star as it was for the rear cover though - no point wasting it).

This was the first pass at the front cover, with the second iteration of the gold on Phil's name (much better), and The first pass at the gold on the two curves.  I say first pass, but it was also the last pass as I was pretty happy with the solution on the first go.  To get a better look at how it's done let's look at the 'A' logo as it progresses.  The one in the above image just has the simple gradient I used for the thumbnails on it.

 So first of all I masked out the various shapes I wanted.  Since I wanted it to look 3D I had to split the shape along the middle, and alternate light and dark for each segment in order to get the sharp changes in shade at the corners.  These foul colours are not used in the final image - they're just to make selecting the various parts easier.

Secondly I took a black and white image of some American flags (taken on July 4th, and heavily manipulated), and distorted it based on the divisions made in the first step.  I then removed the parts of the image that were not needed for the star (They're actually just masked out, so I could still move them around if needed).  Yes, I just used a Photoshop Layer Effect for the red interior, it did the job well enough for what I wanted.

The next step (Bottom Left) was to use yet another layer effect on the star shape and overlay it on the black and white metal.  This one was a Bevel and Emboss.  It definitely looked too "Layer FX" though, which is not a good thing (If you're not a Photoshop user you're probably not aware of the dirty looks this can get you in the right circles).  I needed a way to change that, which turned out to be very simple.

In the last step I've simply added a colour gradient to the gold, and revealed part of the US flags photo over the red star part (I was confident the actual text that was to go here would disguise the rest of the obvious Layer Effects).  A Color Gradient is simply a strip of colour - anything on the left replaces the black in an image, and on the right the white - with anything in between changing the range of greys (or colours, which can be considered the same thing in this case).  The actual gradient used took a while to arrive at - though in the end I just threw the gradient used in the thumbnail images into the Color Gradient, and it worked perfectly, so I could have saved myself some time if I'd started with that.  Anyway, the result looks a lot less like the Layer Effects look, but also doesn't look like real gold (boring), or Comic Book gold (too simplistic), or Airbrushed 80's Logo gold (too cliche), but is instead somewhere between all of these things, which is exactly what I wanted.

This one is just of the full cover as it stood when I dropped the finished 'A' Logo into place.  Note that the spine is very wide (no page count at this point), and I've added WW's nickname to the back.  I just felt it needed something extra there - though it would move for the final cover.  The text on the back is from TARDIS Eruditorum: Volume 2, as a place holder until Phil could write something to go there.  He eventually did so with a remarkable burst of speed.

These were the stars for the back cover.  In the end I didn't go for all 16 from the original cover, but settled on 10.  Primarily this was done to save time since time was tight, but also because I really didn't feel it needed all of them when half of them would be partly or mostly obscured anyway.  I did these and decided to just repeat them.

Under the stars you can see some of the construction of a couple of them.  The 'flower' star was just interlocking circles with the outer parts removed (not as easy as that makes it sound), while the 80's grid square was achieved by creating a checker board pattern, and then warping it slightly before cutting off the excess parts outside of the star shape.  This one being a lot easier than it sounds.

This image here is of the spine when it was half completed.  I realised I wanted the swoop to unify the front back and spine, but since I had't designed the swoop to do that it took more work than I had planned.  Here you can see the swoop, not having had the photo of the flags correctly set up for it has just gone an almost flat yellow, which isn't terribly interesting.  I compensated by using another copy of the flags image, but that still didn't quite work for me, so I ended up hand painting quite a bit of the spine portion, which also made it easier to have the front and side match correctly.

The final image, above, is of the cover as it appears on the book, held betwixt the fair fingers of the author himself.  This was a rare treat, as usually I don't see the final cover until it arrives at my door - but this time Phil had a proof copy done (actually with a very low res image of the cover - it held up rather well).  This allowed me to check if the reds, blues or the gold were wildly off the mark (as they were on TARDIS Eruditorum 2, with the blue being three shades darker then I was expecting).  They don't appear to be off by much in this photo, and so you can now buy a copy of the tome yourself.

All in all this seemed like a big challenge when I first started it, but it turned out to be relatively straight forward and a lot of fun.  It's also made interesting by the fact that I haven't aged it like I do the Who covers - so I didn't have to balance the actual design with the amount of wear and tear and fading and grunge, so I had the training wheels off, so to speak.  They'll be on again for the next cover though.

If you're interested in reading about my previous covers the Psychochronography in blue series started a while ago.  Here's Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.  If you want to learn more about the book (or even buy it) you can head over to Dr. Sandifer's Emporium of Pasley Wonders and Finery.  It's highly recommended.

Also, Ghastly Haloweeeeeeen!

Sketching for July/September '13

With over a month since my last post, you'd think I'd have lots to show.  You would be wrong.  It's not that I've not been active (though I've not produced anywhere near what I should have - almost no speed paints for example), just that much of that I either can't show, or can't show just yet.  Mostly though this month (and the end of the last) has just been a fairly tough slog.  Long time followers will know that October 5th marks an unhappy anniversary for me, and  as such the two weeks around that date are usually a pretty horrible time for me emotionally.   This year though I also had two friends pass away in the time since I last posted.  The latter was very close, and died on Thursday.   I won't post my thoughts on that here - it's best left to other places, but obviously it's affected me deeply.

But on to happier things, at least for this post.  We've had a house guest for a few weeks, and he's likely to be around for a while longer.  While his presence is obviously a minor distraction from the art thing he's also the model guest, and we're very happy to have him. I do also have some things coming up soon - I'm taking a new painting class, and I'll be posting the results before long.  One of the pieces seems to be fairly popular, (though of course, being me I can't see why) and overall there should be three or four paintings by the end of it.  I've also been working on a new book cover for Dr. Sandifer, and that should be hitting the electronic store shelves in the next few weeks - I'll have a post about it ready when it does of course.  There are also another two covers that are essentially done, and just waiting on a final page count.  Those I'll probably blog about in December and January when the books go live.  So yes, things are happening, even if it's not quite in the places I would hope (anatomy practice, sketching, that sort of thing - I've had no mental time for it the past few months, but hopefully that will change soon).  For now though, let's get the sketching up to date...

Two sheets of heads from July through to September.  Varying quality, obviously, although there are a few I'm really pleased with (yes, that's a rarity - mark this date in your diaries).  The profile of the woman (used n the thumbnail of this post) turned out quite nicely, as did the closeup of the eye to her right.  Below the eye is perhaps the best face I've ever drawn while not referring to a photograph - He just looks very natural to me (albeit like Bill Clinton's younger sibling).  On the larger sheet I like the stylization of the chap in the top left, and the expression of the girl below him.  The arm of the girl to their right turned out okay too.  I've also put a little work into drawing some more diverse ethnicities.  Hopefully that's apparent here.

And here are some figure based sketches. I like bits of many of them, but almost none of them as a whole. I still have a long way to go with this stuff evidently.

And there you have it - Not a lot to be going on with, but it won't be over a month until I post again, so there's more to come fairly soon.