"Easy" Cover Redo

I had the semi-brilliant idea to run some of my old cover art through Civitai to see if I could get some easy book cover upgrades going. Many of my early and middle period book covers were created with Second Life avatars, and it shows. AI can give a smoother, creamier, richer appearance than Second Life avatars and art. BTW, the brown circle thing they're in is a Second Life bronze collar, with lots of dangly chains. It looked so much better around a neck. So I ran the base art through Civitai and here's what I got:

Well hell to the yes on this image. Granted, there were a few issues, but overall, dayum. Great looking art. The redheads were transformed to brunettes but I loved their faces and their bodies were dynamite. It was nice of Civitai to give the avatars legs. Civitai was also very generous with fingers for their images. There was also the problem that I wanted one of them to look alarmed and one to look welcoming. (The book is about a woman who is both attracted to the prospect of being collared and dreading it as well, hence two identical woman with different expressions.) Clearly I had my work cut out for me.

After several iterations on Civitai, I discovered that the system simply could not or would not parse the prompt asking for one woman to look frightened and the other to look friendly. It could, however get two women to both look friendly, or both look frightened. And since I had created several iterations in the process of finding this out, I had plenty of pics of two woman scowling and of two women smiling. Time for a face transplant! That would give me my smile and cover up the mangled face on the base art. I chose the artwork above for my base because it was the one that had the hand raised in the same pose as the original. Granted, that hand had too many fingers. Then again, the hand on the other woman's hip had even more extra fingers. And then there's the other other hand extending beyond her hip for no apparent reason. And finally the little knot or shield or jewelry, while PERFECT in my view, would not work for an erotica book cover. Genitals must not only be hidden, but very obviously hidden, so that no one will ever suspect that women have vaginas. I had my work cut out for me. But look what I got when I was through:

Ta-da! Just compare this art with the original cover art. Huge difference. Granted it took hours to get to this point. The face transplant was, ironically, the easiest thing to do. All that hair hides a multitude of sins. Much more difficult was the multifingered hand on the waist. I had to do a hip transplant from another iteration to cover the hand, then tediously rework the art to make the hand extending beyond the the hip disappear. I also had to do tedious reworking to make the woman's arm properly appear to be behind her back. And reworking the raised hand to make it look less obviously wrong was also tedious. It still looks kind of wrong but fixing that would involve redrawing her hand and I wasn't up for that, since it would have been even more tredious. Creating a tiny black thong patch to make the women on the left's pussy very obviously covered was much more of a quick and easy job. The secret of women having vaginas on book covers remains safe!

So my easy book cover took... hours. Like, most of the day. Sigh. If you want to read the story itself, and it's one of my most popular books, you can check it out here.

"Sword and Submission" Cover Art: Attempted Explanation

 Designing the cover art for "Sword and Submission" was much easier than creating the promo video for "Susan: Pet Shop Sex Slave 3." For one thing I didn't have to make a video. So of course I made a video ANYWAY and it turned out to be not nearly as much trouble and it wound up  improving things greatly. But I digress.

I started out with the idea of wanting a picture of Princess Zindra submitting to King Horth's warriors after a bloody battle in her father's throne room. First thing I needed was an image of Princess Zindra looking submissive. For that I went to my Second Life avatars which had all kinds of submissive poses. Turns out I had a  ready-made image. This one:

An image of a frightened naked ballgagged blonde woman in an urban night landscape. All it had going for it was that the woman was beautiful and  she had her hands up in surrender. But that was enough, it turns out.

I then ran the SL avatar through Leonardo AI's Image to Image program, which did me a huge solid.  I got this:

I did not ask Leonardo AI to get rid of the ballgag. Leonardo has a problem with gags. Generally it just renders them very badly. Substituting those beautiful lips for a gag worked fine for me. With AI you take what you can get.

 I now had a beautiful image, but it was unfortunately naked. Naked cover art does not pass muster on Smashwords. So I used my GIMP skills to draw on pasties and filmy tranlucent panties, very simple crude art, and got this:

OK, not perfect but not naked! Still I wanted more, so I ran my revised Leonardo art back through Leonardo again, including running it through the Upscaler program. And I got this: (Yeah, the third finger on the right hand was off, but whatchagonnado?) And why is the image flipped? I honestly don't know. It came in "handy" that it was flipped, but that was much later in the process.

I don't know why Leonardo AI decided that Upscaling art included drawing on a  filmy bra to match the panties, but it worked for me. It drew on nipple bumps as well (Smashwords does not approve of nipple bumps) but it was but the work of a moment to smooth those babies out in GIMP. So I had my sexy slave Zindra image for the cover! Even if the fingers on her right hand were suspicious.

Now that I had sexy mostly naked Zindra  down, I had to do the background. The proved much easier because no naked people, or people having sex was called for. As I've noted before, your average graphic AI will fight you tooth and nail before it will create a naked or nearly naked woman. (They also favor images of unhappy Asians in work uniforms, especially for crowd shots.)

But in this image I didn't get unhappy Asians in work uniforms and since there were no naked women requested, after a few false starts, I had my background scene. To wit:

OK, so it had a couple of flaws. The bodies on the floor are all kind of problematical if you look at them at all closely, so don't do that! 

The body in the foreground was the worst. But being a super genius cover designer, I had an ace in the hole in my sleeve. I realized the best way to place Zindra was to put her behind the looming figure in the foreground and in front of all those bodies. And I knew I could do that easily. I just copied the figure in the foreground and place it in a new layer. And I cropped it in tight and got this, my cover art:

I moved the warrior layer and the Zindra layer to a new location and closed in on the two of them. That got rid of all the bodies in the background and Zindra's butt covered the wonky parts of the body in the foreground and the warrior's body blocks Zindra's wonky hand. Because her image was flipped! Win win win!

The more obeservant among you may note that the image in the cover is not exactly the same as the image above. Very similar but the woman's posture isn't the same as the one in the image above.There's a reason for that, having to do with my further experimentation with motion videos. Which I will save for another post.

Christina Ricci On Display

“You want me to raise my arms even higher Master? Why?”

Gorean Positions:

Display
The slave rises, standing erect with legs a shoulder length apart, the back straight, head high with eyes lowered, raising the arms and bending them at the elbows, entwining the fingers behind the neck for inspection.

Notice that Christina Ricci is posed in the Gorean “display” position (see above) while chained and half naked in the promotional photo for the movie “Black Snake Moan.” Coincidence … or Conspiracy?

Why Save Chuck

Yvonne Strahovski tape gagged in the "Chuck and the Helicopter" episode of the "Chuck" TV series.
Fans of the TV series “Chuck” are rallying to save the series from cancellation. Why should we care? Because hot blond series female lead Yvonne Strahovski keeps winding up in situations like the one pictured above. She even wore a Slave Leia outfit in one episode. We need her … and I guess Chuck as well.