Do you live in a city, a county, or a state that has an official seal? You know, that bit of artwork set in a circle that serves as the official image of that community? Often you’ll find the seal on envelopes mailed out to you, the citizen, or on letterhead from said city or county informing of you such inviting events as Ogdenville Salutes Soybeans Days.
Have you ever looked at one of those suckers? I mean, really looked at it? Chances are if it’s a letterhead it’s nothing more than a series of black squiggles in a circle that you can barely make out as anything at all. That’s because the original design was printed out on 8 ½” x 11” pieces of paper and almost filled them. Nobody thought about what it would look like at ½ inches tall on a letterhead. Not that they would have cared if they had. The seal was probably designed by a committee, most of them political types who don’t know a thing about art and don’t care either.
All they know is, they want their art on the image. And by their art they mean whatever bee is in their bonnet. Commissioner A wants a sheaf of wheat to symbolize the heroic farmers who fed their community. And Commissioner B wants a freighter for the sailors, and Commissioner C wants a church, and Commissioner D wants a factory for the capitalists, and Commissioner E wants a pick and shovel for the miners, and commissioner F just wants great tracts of land and Commissioner G wants railroad cars and so they sit down and work their differences up and after much screaming, fighting and bloodshed, they come up with a compromise that includes every last thing that every Commissioner wants in a confused jumble which takes some looking to figure out at full-page printout size.
And what you get is something like the official seal of Allegany County, Maryland, as seen below in 5”x5” size or something like it (I have no control over what size screen you’re reading this piece on).
(I have no idea what the target circles next to the house are all about. Maybe bowhunting or something.)
And when this seal is printed on an envelope, say at two inch size, it’ll look much more confusing, I mean you have to work hard to figure out what you’re looking at is supposed to represent:
And when it’s reduced to one inch to go on an envelope or a letterhead, the size at which most people will arguably see it, it gets downright indecipherable:
(Disclaimer: the Allegany seal, while definitely a poorly done seal, is hardly unique, I could have pulled up hundreds that were just as bad or worse if I had wanted to. I have no animus toward Allegany County or its people. I just picked this one because it illustrated my point nicely.)
The way to avoid this kind of problem is to design a seal that has a simple, pleasing design that can be scaled to various sizes and still look great. A very nice example here, the seal of Pinellas County, Florida, at 4x5 inches:
And it scales to 1x1.5 very nicely:
It look good at any size and gives the city a unique visual image. That’s all that you need to ask of any seal. It also says “sunshine and water” pretty good too, which is definitely gravy, county identity-wise.
My point here isn’t to make fun of politicians in committees trying to be artists when they are not, rewarding though that is. My point is that politicians and writers and editors do not have the mental tools to create good art. They think entirely in terms of images of various persons/plants/buildings/whatever that to their minds symbolize the place they’re trying to create an image for. And they don’t care much about the image’s visual appeal, nor do they think about how it might scale. Nor do they think about other aspects the image might convey.
And that’s not how you do good design. Politicians, bureaucrats, writers and editors don’t have the mental toolkit to do a good job of creating a visual design.
You need artists for that, people whose visual cortex knows what it’s doing and who have been trained, through schooling or experience (mostly schooling) to understand how to create successful commercial images.
Now I’m a writer who creates his own covers, partly from vanity but mostly because I can’t afford to pay artists decent wages. But I have this much going for me: I know I’m not qualified here. So the first thing I do when I go about designing a cover is let my stupid writer brain come up with whatever it likes.
In the case of the cover for “The Slave Girl Diet” I had already come across just the image I wanted for the cover. It was this piece of art:
It’s a still from Device Bondage’s great video “Athletic MILF Fuck Toy Cherie Deville Punished in Bondage and Sybian!!” And it beautifully expresses the emotional intensity of a woman being fucked senseless while bound and gagged on a relentless sybian fucking machine, and dreaming of cakes and pies and whatnot and drooling all over herself for a variety of reasons as a result. It would have been PERFECT for the cover, except for a few minor considerations.
Mostly, for example, that Kink.com holds the copyright on the image and I’d have to make arrangements with Kink.com to get their permission to use the image commercially, which would probably have involved a transfer of funds from my bank account to theirs that would be greater than the likely sales the book will generate. Probably MUCH greater.
In addition, I would have to generate artwork to cover Cherie’s naughty bits, which are on glorious display here. And because it’s a photo the artwork would have to be photographic, too, which means difficult to do well, much more difficult than the usual white panties and bra I have done on several illustrated covers.
In further addition, the books main character is supposed to be very overweight, and a careful examination of Cherie’s body will show that she is a marvelously trim and fit physical specimen. Look at those abs! So I would have to artistically adjust Cherie’s contours to make her look in need of a diet, and that would pretty much entail drawing her from scratch. I wanted the image so bad I spent an hour or so playing with various GIMP filters to see if I could come up with outline art that I could use as the basis for a drawing that might somehow resemble Cherie and capture her expression and pose, but after that hour I was pretty sure that I was looking at days of work with no guarantee of success, so I very sensibly shelved that idea. (But it would have been such a great cover, if only…)
Next I went to Deposit Photos, my preferred source of legal photo images I can use for covers (because I pay for them.) I didn’t have any clear ideas, so I just typed “woman diet” into the search engine to see what I could find.
But at this point, I did do something smart. I realized that even if an image didn’t work for me as is, many of them might contain visual ideas I could borrow, or “steal” if you want to be accurate about it. So I kept my brain open as I looked at the images, which took major effort.
Interestingly, bondage images were present. There were images of (clothed) women with their wrists bound by measuring tape, and gagged by measuring tape. And I would have used them, if the images had said anything other than “diet” which is all they said. The book is erotica, after all.
But I did find several other ideas that might be worth borrowing. There were a TON of diet images available. But in the end, I only chose one, and I didn’t steal it, either: I bought it fair and square. It was this one:
It’s very spot-on of course, and not at all erotic. But what if there was a naked woman in bondage looking at all this art? Much better! So I went to Second Life and got out one of my avvies and posed her a bit (you may recognize her from “Junie Jamieson, Captured By Gangsters” book) and got this image:
which was pretty much what I was thinking of. (The gray background is my equivalent of a green screen.) Now just combine that image with all those hands offering tempting treats and I’d have a great cover.
Well, not really. There was more ground to cover. But before I got on that ground, I took a little detour. They have very easy ways of customizing avatars using slider bars in Second Life, including controlling how thin or fat the avatar looks. I could make a fat version of my thin Chloe avvie. And after a little playing with the slider, I had exactly that:
And that’s when I had my great idea: if I superimposed the thin Chloe image over the fat Chloe image I could have a cover that said “dieting” and “nudity” both at the same time. So I gave it a shot: ta-da!
Unfortunately, it’s not a very attractive image. It’s visually confusing and hard to figure out. Looking at it, I realized I was once again making the classic non-artist mistake of trying to get a literal visual representation of an idea and thinking it will brilliantly illustrate the idea and look good as well. That just isn’t true, as any number of city and county and state seals convincingly demonstrate, but it’s just the way non-artists’ brains work.
So, back to the drawing board, or more accurately, back to the gray screen. I decided to once again borrow from the ideas of artists. So I bought a couple of sex toys on the Second Life market and started looking at the animations the sex toys put my avatar through. This was a long, arduous process, because Second Life is 3D and what you see in an animation depends on what angle you’re looking at the animation from, then taking a pic when you find something that is potentially interesting.
Fortunately, SL has excellent camera controls that let you look at things from a wide variety of angles very easily. Unfortunately, if you accidentally click on the wrong thing as you’re whizzing around with your camera, which is very easy to do, the whole set up can go to hell, with the camera out of position and/or the avatar out of position. And if you want to make a change in clothing or hair or avatar or anything, that can be time-consuming as well.
Most images you get are just kinda “meh” but you also get some very wrong ones:
But it can be worth it. Because in the process of just taking pics to see what looks good, I got this:
And this image was so much better than anything I could have come up by thinking about how visual images might represent the ideas of dieting and sex slave. It’s a still from an animation showing the avatar squirming in ecstasy atop the sybian. It’s one of several that would made an excellent image for the cover. Because the sight of the slightly thick body squirming in ecstasy also looks like a visualization of longing.
And if you just happened to have an image of a bunch of hands offering a visual treat surrounding that naked, writhing image of longing, you just might have a pretty good piece of cover art.
So I had two elements, but I knew from looking at the original diet art that I didn’t want a flat background. Something a little richer would be better. So it was back to Deposit Photos where I looked for a variety of backgrounds using simple search terms: green background, blue background, pink background, etc. And pink background turned out to be the winner. I found a series of images that involved pink paint dropped into water, photographed at high speed. They struck me as pure visual metaphors for orgasm. I’m confident about that because I wasn’t really looking for visual metaphors for orgasm, I just looked at these images and said “Oh… that’s it.” I won’t place the image that I picked out on this page because it’s quite large (see: background art) and it wouldn’t tell you a lot. I’ll just lay the finished cover down, I think you’ll see what I saw:
I think that’s a respectable cover. But here’s the thing: I’m pretty sure any pro artist could have come up with a cover that is just as good or better, and could have done it in less time and with a lot less effort because they wouldn’t have gone down all the dead ends I did. They would probably have come up with much better ideas than mine.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am. At the very least, a skilled artist could have created an original artwork based on the original Cherie Deville image from Kink and made her heavier and (just a teensy bit) more clothed and also not Kink’s intellectual property. And that would have been fine.
The only thing an artist can’t do, is do it cheaper. And I wouldn’t want an artist to do my covers for free. The whole point of this post is to say, “Artists are absolutely worth the money.” If and when I get the money to buy cover art, artists will be getting my money. I’ll pay it... gladly. It took me two days to create that cover art. I could use that time.
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