Cover for the Smashwords version of "Louisiana Slay Ride"
I like the cover art I got for “Louisiana Slay Ride" but getting there wasn’t easy. The big problem was the left leg, particularly the knee, though censorship issues posed their usual problems.
As you can see on the raw art file, the entire left leg is off. Compare it to the right leg, which is smooth and nicely modeled, connecting nicely to the hip, the left leg is very nearly two dimensional. The seam between the left thigh and the left calf is almost invisible and ends way too soon. (I double checked by looking at photos of kneeling models, the seam was always clearly visible.)
Even worse is the knee. The knee is a tricky thing to accurately represent. But that dark blob where the kneecap should be looks nothing like a knee should. And that bright Y-shaped highlight is in the wrong place and looks off.
It’s a problem with Second Life avatars, joints like the shoulders, elbows and knees tend to render unrealistically. But the whole left leg going out is a mystery. If you look at pretty much the same avatar used for the cover of “I, The Glider Gun” which is taken from straight-on, you’ll see that both legs are nicely modeled.
Why does the left leg go two dimensional in a ¾ view? No idea. But I had to deal with that stupid knee. So I created a new layer in GIMP and put a white area matching the dark area of the knee. And I copied skin tone from the left thigh and put it on another layer. Then I used the white layer to lighten the dark knee blob, playing with the opacity until I had it lightened to roughly the same value as the inner thigh. Finally, I made the inner thigh skin sample visible and played with its opacity until the dark blobby knee area looked like the inner thigh skin, only a little lighter.
The idea was to capture the underlying kneecap shape with the skin tones where they should be. But what I wound up was mostly flat skin tones like the inner thigh. So I did the artistic thing and covered up the damn knee with my byline. Now that’s artistry!
A decent artist could have solved the problem in five or ten minutes, I’m sure. Took me two hours to come up with my half-assed solution.
The censorship needed for the breasts on the Amazon cover was also an issue. I could have just had the avatar wear a bra. But nooooo, I decided that since the pasties I was using for the Smashwords cover were white, I could create a white bra layer and lay it on over the avatar’s breasts. Pasties hide the nipples, bra obscures the breasts, boob’s yer uncle. And since you can get a white overlay looking three dimensional by playing with the opacity of the white layer, and bras are easy to create by using portions of circles as your templates, it can be a quick, easy task.
But the pasties proved to be a bit time-consuming, because if the bra covered the pasties or the chain between them it would look wrong. So after I created the bra outline I had to go into the bra layer and carefully erase those portions of the bra that covered the pasties and chain. I also had to erase those portions of the bra that covered the curls of the avatars hair that would have covered her bra strap. It didn't require any artistic skill, but it was time consuming, painstaking work.
All that work with the knee and the bra on top of posing the avatar, finding the background art, obtaining and creating the chain art in Second Life, and doing some other little stuff like enlarging the size of the avatar’s thong cup to keep the censors happy, the job was time consuming.
So it took about a day and a half to come up with both cover versions. Maybe two days. OK, two days. I was happy with the cover art, and I enjoyed making it, but damn. The images based on photos are a lot easier. But it’s much harder to get a clip art photo posed properly and to make the photo as naked and bondage-y as I can get away with.
Just part of the fun of being an indie author, I guess.
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