Cover Images Again

Reading Scott Archer Jones' essay in the Piker Press "Why We Write" I was inspired by his words about the characters inside his imagination wanting to speak, so that he had to find the right words to satisfy them. I went to the Library of Congress Flickr gallery and found snippets of people.

And then I got a book from my shelves, an ancient book called In the Heart of the Sierras, by J. M. Hutchings, a book so old it doesn't have a page with a copyright date in it. I photographed a page without illustrations, leached the color out of it in Photoshop, and added my snippets.

I like it.

And I love the internet. I did a search on "In the Heart of the Sierras" and found that the book was published in 1886 -- the title page was torn out of my copy.

Working with Public Domain Photos

This one was a 15-minute project. In fact it was more like a 10-minute project. I wanted to make an illustration to go with Pete Armetta's short fiction "Gypsy Hill" in the Piker Press.

I found a public domain pic of a park online, cropped it to pare it down to the elements and the dimensions I wanted, and used the clone tool to make certain elements disappear. Can't find them, can you? In Photoshop, jarring objects can become invisible!

From Image--> Adjustments--> Saturation, I saturated the colors a little, making them more vivid, then darkened the pic a little. With Filters, I used Artistic--> Paint Daubs. Voila!

 There was a time that I sneered at "flash fiction," but I find that Pete Armetta's short-shorts can inspire some arty effort in me. He's made me a believer in tiny snippets of writing.

This Watercolor Took Several Days

It's nice when you can finish a project in one day, but it doesn't always happen that way.

This one, the cover image of the Piker Press to accompany Ndaba Sibanda's story "The Escape Route in the Dark," began with the part with the man's head near the bottom.

Following through with admonitions to let everything dry, I skipped to the form of the woman, the skulls and skeletons, the cows' heads, the bees.

I let the work stew for a day, then added the colored brush strokes, all with the same brush you saw in the previous post. (I love it!)

In the next step, I taped the picture to my watercolor board on the tabletop easel, and wet the paper in the bottom right corner; the picture was taped up so that the colored pigment would flow to that corner. When that was dry enough to stop flowing, I brought the paper into the house to dry in the furnace's warmth.

Finally, I used my Pilot V7 pen to outline each brushstroke, with a Staedtler .1 pen for the really tiny bits in the smallest skeleton. From there we were Photoshop-bound to add in the black background.

Now the original resides in my scrapbook, protected by tracing paper. I'm thinking I'd like to add the black background in ink, and then frame it under glass. Time will tell. I was pleased with the result.

More Cover Art

This was the cover art for the Piker Press story by Terry Petersen, "Between Chester and Me."

I used a public domain image and the texture function in Photoshop, then Filters--> Texture--> Texturizer--> Burlap (for the background) then flattened the layers of the image and Filters--> Artistic--> Poster Edges.

Playing with the Moon

Sometimes all you want to do is just fiddle with stuff and see what happens when you press that  button.

I took one of my digital photos of the moon, and cropped most of the sky out of it, and then "inverted" it. (In Photoshop, Image--> Adjustments--> Invert.)

Very simple procedure, but fun.

Illustration for a Poem

I like that the Piker Press is getting more poetry submissions these days, and I like having some sort of image to accompany the poems. This one came to me as I was thinking about Bernie's poem about rhyme, "Poetry Writ Bad."

When I attempt to write poetry that rhymes, I always write the alphabet across part of the page. For this illustration, I put white letters vertically on a double gradient.

Simple, but I like when an idea sweeps into my mind so forcefully that I have to scribble down the plan on any piece of paper handy. This one was penciled onto the blank space of Howie's dog license renewal that was lying on the table.