Temptation and the Gambler Cover Art Explanation

For my background, I needed an alleyway strewn with the bodies of a gang of thugs who'd just lost a street fight. But AI doesn't "get" "strewn." Look how neatly it organized the thugs. Or "thugs" really, these look more like crime victims than criminals. But at least it got "alley" down cold.

Since I had already published this story on Amazon, I already had a cover I could have used, but I didn't like it. Here it is:

Really, just a generic erotica cover based on an image from Deposit Photos. Doesn't really say anything about the characters at all. I did use GIMP to enhance the woman's butt. I'm not proud of that... or ashamed. It is what it is.

The artwork was just too generic, I wanted art that said something about the characters other than "horny." Nothing wrong with "horny" but it's kind of the ground floor for erotica. So I went to Civitai and found some Loras that were designed for creating superhero avatars, whcih was good enough for what I wanted (costumed crimefighters, no superpowers, like Batman. Unless you consider being a billionaire a superpower, which it definitely is). 

But I have been working with AI long enough to know its limitations, and one of its limitations is it doesn't do a good job of having avatars interact, unless you want one of the poses Loras are trained on, like blowjobs, fucking, doggie style, etc. 

Sometimes AI art programs will fuck things up even if you DO ask for a standardized sex position. Although to be fair, this one is based on an image-to-image original, rather than a text prompt. But I can ASSURE you that the original image looked NOTHING like what I got. The hilarious part is the way the woman's face came out PERFECT.

So in the interests of not spending days working on getting a romantic clench right for my cover (as I did for the cover of "The Taking of Shining Cloud")

Yeah, I had some issues with the cover of "Shining Cloud."

 I decided to make the superhero images seaparate images and layer them side by side on top of the background art. First I made the Temptation image. I was looking for an image of a Goth girl dressed for clubbing, as that was part of Temptation's crime fighting technique: she dressed like a sexy club kiddie who's been out clubbing and walked unsteadily through dark alleys in the bad part of town, luring rapists and gangs into attacking her, then dispatching them with her crime-fighting tools. Civitai's Lora had little or no problem handling this request, it came up with several usable images in just two or three iterations. Here's one of the better ones:

I also requested "curvy" in my prompt. Love the expression on this one. This is typical of the results I got.

Next I asked for images of The Gambler. Once again, plenty of images to work with from just a few iterations. Here's a nice one:

"Hi ladies! Anyone wanna check out the lucky shamrock in my fly?"

So I picked out two figures and mounted them in layers over my alleyway pic. This had the fortunate effect of blocking out the mass of the too-symettrically stacked bodies, so they suspicious symmentry was hidden. I reused the text from the original cover art because I think the subhead is fire. Here's what I came up with.

And so here we have it. Hopefully it will result in millions, perhaps billions, in sales. We shall see! You can get the book by clicking here, or on the pic.

About That Cover Art For The Prison Bitch Trilogy...

Vagina trouble!

Image source: Cover art by me, from a custom Second Life avatar run through Leonardo.

Leonardo AI can be such a damned tease. I ran this pretty good Second Life avatar through it:

Tanned Second Life bikini babe wearing the tiniest microthong evah!

The Leonardo avatar I got was just gorgeous. But I guess that tiny little microthong on the Second Life avatar defeated Leonardo and it screwed up the image. It ended the thong somewhere on the avatar's happy trail rather than over it's pussy. (Leonardo did get one image right: it put the tiny microthong where it belonged, half-buried in the Leonardo image's pussy.  But even then, Smashwords is allergic to pussies. No tiniest vaguest bit of what might be a vagina can appear on a Smashwords cover. I've been dinged for it before. No visible genitalia, even for hardcore taboo erotica.

So I went with the Leonardo AI that had the best other features, which was the one above. Its interpretation of the pasties on the SL avatar was brilliant. The image had the sleek, tanned blonde look of a beach party girl. So  I tried to make the thong work. But it was incredibly difficult because I went at it in the stupidest possible way. (I blame GIMP!) I wanted to just widen and extend the thong bottom so that it just barely covered the entire vagina instead of ending somewhere in the woman's happy trail region, leaving her pussy, such as it was, exposed.

All I really needed to do was cut and paste some pieces of the existing thong to get the shape I needed to pass Smashwords muster. That proved problematical however. The problem was that the bottom of the image's crotch was wide and distant from the top of the thong, and needed a lot of stretching and reshaping to reach where it needed to, and it had to follow natural lines from the top of the thong. The basic problem was my conception of the thong was all wrong, so I kept creating weirdly shaped thongs.

I finally decided my problem was the piece-by-piece approach, so I used GIMP's Cage Transform tool to create a thong that covered what it needed to. It seemed so plausible: you drew a cage outlining the object you want to change, with points set along the lines of the cage. When you grab a point and move it, the image changes to conform to the new outline of the cage. It seems like just the thing to create a thong that covered what it needed to.

Disembodied thong. A shame it went wrong!

This proved to be wrong. I created a layer that was just the thong itself, pasted it into a layer above the base image, and attempted to adjust the thong's dimensions. I had imagined moving the cage would keep the shapes being moved the same, and that the distance I moved the cage element would determine how much the image distorted. This turned out not to be true. Using the cage tool was very much like using the smudge tool. The smudge tool is a tool that will be very familiar to pastelists (people who create art with pastel sticks, not people who paste lists). It allows you to mix colors together by smudging them together with the tool, much as a pastel or charcoal artist smudges their chalk with his finger to mix it with nearby chalks. It's  great tool, I use it often.

But what I got when I used the cage tool was a smudged, lumpy outline of the thong instead of the smooth-edged garment. And because the amount of distance the thong distorted did not match the amount of distance the cage points were dragged, it was verr hard to get the thong parts moved to where they needed to be. And of course when the cage points were dragged, the edges of the image were smudged as well as moved. So instead of an enlarged, differently-shaped thong I got a fuzzy, blobby approximation of the thong. After some obvious failures, I dumped the cage transform tool.

But a good thing did come out of it. One of the fuzzy thong outlines I got from the cage transform tool was shaped like a breech cloth instead of a thong. It looked like it was hanging loose between her legs instead of tucked between them. And I realized that that was a lot easier to build using cut and past, so I did that. And it looked even sexier than a thong that covered her entire pussy area, because it looked like it was hanging loose which meant her pussy was just hanging out there behind the breech cloth. The slightest breeze might flip the cloth aside revealing her pussy. Much sexier.

If you want an example of the way the smudge tool works when you've got the right task for it, notice that the image I worked with has transformed the ballgag in the Second Life Avatar's mouth into mouth hooks, or something like them. But the image on the cover wears a ballgag. What happened there was that one of the Leonardo AIs came out with a pretty good ballgag so I lopped off her head and shoulders and transplanted them to the one I used. I pasted the head into a layer over the base and fiddled with the color values and then merged it down with the other layer. There was a faint line where the shoulders were on top of the base because the colors did not exactly match. But I just took the smudge tool and mixed those colors together and now you absolutely cannot tell that the head on the cover is a transplant. No one would have ever known if I had not told everyone right here on this post. Handy thing, that smudge tool.

 But what about the fully dressed Kim Halstead?

A modern professional woman, you betcha, courtesy of Leonardo AI.

My initial plan for finance banker Kim was to pick up an image from Deposit Photos. I knew they had tons of images of women in business suits, and tons of women with sexy bodies. So it seemed likely that they would have images of women with sexy bodies in business suits. I mean, c'mon.

Turns out I was wrong. There is a great gulf fixed between the bodies of women in business attire and women in bikinis, underwear or nothing. Sexy women often have curvy bodies. Business women are almost all thin and not curvy. Actually, among the ones I checked, "almost" is not required: none of them were curvy.

So I went back to Leonardo AI and did a text prompt to get the image above. It was easy, almost ridiculously so. The woman was clothed and not having sex and not doing anything  that could be interpreted as having sex or being sexy, she was just standing there being bankerish. No censorship issues. I did get a certain amount of images of women who were not curvy, and images of women who looked overweight by not curvy. But I also got a certain amount of curvy women in business suits. Didn't take long at all.

And as a result I got banker Kim standing next to naked and gagged and bound Kim, who is also standing.

Finally, for the foreground I reused my Princess Gaia image from the cover of the book.

Love that pissed-off expression.

This time I used more of her body, but still left out the guy who's fucking her doggie style because of course that wouldn't fly for a book cover. I also had to emblonden her hair (just a matter of color cycling her hair and then pasting it in over her brown hair), since this is supposed to be another version of Kim, who is blond. The idea is to represent Kim as Banker Kim, Sexy Kim, and Fucked, Bound and Gagged Kim as she sinks into the pit of depravity that is Club Rape. 

The prison with all the guards is leftover from my Club Rape cover. I made quite a few background images for that one, most of them unusable for that cover, but this one worked out well for this cover. What I liked about it was the cool colors, because it added depth to the image. Gaia/Kim in the foreground is in far warmer colors than the figures of Banker Kim and Naked Kim behind her, who were in much warmer colors than the guards and prison behind them.

Here's the cover all put together:

Go ahead and buy the book, I'm a much better writer than I am an artist. Just click on this text to go to Smashwords.

And here's what's happening to Gaia/Kim on the cover, just so you know:

Ain't it always the way?

Prison Bitch 3 Cover Censored By Direct2Digital

 I got a note this morning from Direct2Digital stating that my cover art was too pornographic. As is usual with censorship, it was very vague about what was offensive on my cover. For reference, this is the cover they censored:

As you'll note, all naughty bits are covered by red smoke. The complaint said no nudity is allowed on the covers, and listed various body parts that are not allowed: nipples, butts, butt cracks, glory trails and nudity. It's kept vague to make artists censor their work more heavily. If you aren't quite sure what's allowed by the guidelines, you tend to censor yourself more heavily, making censors happier. Censors are a diseased and twisted part of the human race that can only get off sexually by not allowing others to see sexy images or read sexy things.

Of course there is an obvious butt crack on the cover, belonging to the woman lying on the floor. I thought it would be OK since the woman is clearly wearing a thong. The waist bands are very clear and obvious. And the darkness at the top of her butt crack looks exactly like what the top of a thong generally looks like when seen from the rear. But clearly, this is not how the censor "saw" it. So I made some changes on my cover to cover all possible contingencies, and that's how we wind up with the new cover as seen below:

The new "improved" cover for Prison Bitch 3. All naughty bits covered with smoke. The woman hanging from the ceiling is just a bunch of body parts, and the image of the woman in the foreground isn't much better. It is, in my opinions, worse in every respect than the cover I went with. I mean, I could write some bullshit about the cover being more dramatic because it puts more focus on the women's faces, but that would be bullshit. It's a worse cover than the original one. And it's also much worse than the cover I imagined when I made up the cover. This one:

Oh, look, boobies! Not all THAT different from my initial cover, but I think all the naked women and the red smoke and the guys with guns work together when the women are actually, visibly naked. Plus, this is erotica, dammit! Those two brown nipple dots aren't going to destroy anyone who's sane. And setting your standards for insane people is insane!

And the hell of it is, I have a lot of VERY NAKED covers. For example:

And this:

These covers are current covers that are just fine by Direct2Digital. I have no idea why. In any event, my apologies for the cover art. It was not my idea.

Cover Story: "Prison Bitch 3" The Hell Of Leonardo AI And Other Tribulations

Once again too impoverished to hire a cover artist, I sallied forth with my limited skills and helplessly left-brained brain to create a masterpiece and came forth with, well, probably not a masterpiece.

I’ve always liked the weird aesthetic of the old Men’s Adventure magazines, or “sweat mags” as they were also called. They weren’t really bondage porn but they were VERY prone to stories about Nazis, World War II-era Japanese soldiers and other seriously evil types tormenting scantily clad women whose only crime was beauty.

I think that aesthetic would go very well with softcore bondage porn or even hardcore bondage porn. The raw, lurid qualities of the covers translate well into porn. And I had a scene in my story that fit right in with the sweat mag aesthetic, so I was all over it.

What I wanted was a scene of prison guards and raiders shooting it out in a red-lit room filled with smoke and naked or scantily clad screaming women in bondage. For the record, here’s what I came up with:

But getting there was a real pain in the ass. The easy part, it turned out, was getting the naked, scantily clad screaming women. Usually that’s an issue with most commercial art AIs. And Leonardo AI as usual did morphy tricks with hands, feet, breasts and whatnot, but for some reason it wasn’t all that prudish about nudity. Au contraire, as I explained in my post about the Jinkie Jenkins promo cover.

To get the various naked women in bondage I used several mostly naked Second Life avatars and ran them through various bondage poses. I got quite a few images, some of them pretty good, some of them unusable and most of them kind of in the middle. I picked out three and ran them through Leonardo AI to see if I could get them humanized. And mostly it worked.

It worked most spectacularly on the SL avatar that had the best expression. This one:

I have an attachment for my Second Life avatars that allows me to place various expressions on their faces. The horrified and shocked look on the avatar’s face worked beautifully. But the distortion on the mouth was too much for the SL avatar to handle. Although the expression was approximately correct, the mouth was misshapen, ruining the whole effect.

Fortunately, when I ran the avatar through Leonardo AI it corrected the mouth perfectly. It also added to the shock and horror of the expression and made the flesh more smooth and lifelike.

I also wanted a body lying on the floor. That proved very easy, the SL avatar in a sleeping pose worked fine. The hands were especially nice, and I was afraid that when I ran it through Leonardo AI it would do its usual hi-jinks with the hands. But it did not, they came out beautifully, and the flesh came out fleshier, too.

Those hand are just exquisite. I suspect because the fingers are fully extended and roughly in parallel. Very unlike AI art to get them so right. Butt came out nice, too, not like the pussybutts.

So we had our picture of a dead woman. Except, in case there’s some rule against dead women on the covers of erotica, I want it clearly understood that the woman is not dead, she is merely pining for the fjords, as sex slaves sometimes do.

Finally, there was our woman hanging from the ceiling, who is of course Kim Halstead, the protagonist of the story. Her SL avatar was problematical. Her feet were a mess and her torso was kind of twisty.

So I ran it through Leonardo AI hoping for improvement and I got some. The torso came out fine, the face and hair were more lifelike, but the feet were still a mess and in fact her calves had some weird new bulges to them. Also her facial expression was wrong. She was supposed to be terrified. But the ballgag prevented her mouth from conveying her terror, and her eyes were staring calmly at the viewer and her brows were relaxed, giving her more of a "What’s-all-this-then?" expression. Which works in some cases of women wearing ballgags but not this one. So I had to go in there and use my vaunted artistic skills to make her look horrified.

The torso on this Leonardo AI output doesn't look twisty, but the feet are still a mess and there are all sorts of strange lumps on her calves that weren't there before. Plus, her expression is what art directors call "All Wrong."

Leonardo doesn't "get" ballgags at all. So I got a few like this. But at least the horrible ballgag and mouth distract from what's going on with the hands.

This is the best result I got from Leonardo AI. The fingers are dodgy and the she doesn't look terrified or horrified, just... concerned.

New and improved! I didn't spot the issue with the expression until I already had the background art and a lot of the smoke laid in, plus I'd altered the darkness of the image to fit in more with the "smoke-filled room" atmosphere. That's why the image is so much darker than the others. I erased portions of the old eyebrows, drew in new ones, widened the eyes and put in a little drool from the ballgag for good measure. (Also it subtly makes her look more helpless and out of control.) And I lopped off an extra finger or three that were on the original.

With my naked women quota fulfilled, I needed the background art, the room in which the gunfight was being held, filled with smoke and lit by red lights.

Generally, Leonardo AI and other art AIs don’t do well with crowds and people shooting guns. I would much rather have gone to Deposit Photos and used it for background art. But Deposit Photos (and most other image services) generally are weak on images of gunfights inside a room or a building. There are lots of images of soldiers fighting in the outdoors, but very few interior shots.

So it was back to Leonardo AI. And it is better than Deposit Photos about giving you soldiers fighting in a room. The problem was that the soldiers often pointed their guns at their allies, rather than the enemy. And they sometimes did not hold the guns properly. The guns also tended to morph and generally look sus. I had wanted an image of two groups of men firing guns at one another with screaming naked women caught in the crossfire.

But what I wound up settling for was one group of men carrying guns and running toward the viewer. Only one of them was pointing his gun at an ally! Then I placed the naked women screaming in the foreground.

And the thing I had to tie it all together with was smoke. Yeah, that red smoke covers up a lot of sins, and I’m not just talking about Kim’s nipples and genitals. I’m also talking about those ugly feet and calves. And the screaming woman’s breasts. And her hands. Smoke is my new favorite cover art element!

OK, not EXACTLY what I wanted, but there ARE soldiers in a room.

OK, SOMEBODY'S about to get shot. Just not any identifiable enemies. This happened a LOT.

After all this work I wound up with a cover that was a lot closer to my original intent than I expected. Was it as good as I would have gotten if I’d hired a decent cover artist? Of course not. But I do like it. It does have that sweat mag cover feel to it. Will readers like it, too? I guess we’ll find out…

"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.

Creating the Cover Art for "Tiny, Big" -- Yes, you, too, can create bad cover art!

Beginning and end stage images I used to build a book cover, that I'll be referring to in this post.

Laura the Tiny Elf before and after

Gina the Big Elf before and after

I'm not an artist and I know it. But I have developed a set of tricks to let me create stuff that kinda looks like art and fulfills Amazon's rules for cover art, and I thought I'd share it with you because it's fun, at least, to me.

(Note: I use GIMP for my covers. It's an open-source program for creating and editing digital images, basically, the equivalent of Photoshop, only free. Like Photoshop, it has a fairly steep learning curve. I can't honestly say how steep, because I've used it for years and I've stepped in all the cow pies. I do remember spending a lot of time grinding my teeth and wondering what the hell I'd done wrong this time when I was first starting out. However, it is possible (as in “almost certain”) that you are better than me at learning new software and will not grind your teeth down to nubbins, which do not work so well for chewing.)

As a marketer of my erotica, I want my cover art to be as raunchy and naked as possible. Amazon, unfortunately, has Standards, and they include No Nudity. Also, strictly for erotica covers, No Butt Crack, No Underboob, No Sideboob, No Happy Trails, And of course, No Nipples and No Genitals. The rules are move relaxed in other categories, probably out of a recognition that if nudity were allowed in erotica, you'd get wall-to-wall nudity on the book covers, whereas with other genres you only occasionally get something like this:

 (A recent cover on r/badscificovers.)

But back to our cover art. Only one of these images was “created” by me, that would be Laura the Tiny. Gina the Big's art I found on Pixabay. I was hoping to find a photo that would work, but came across the Gina image that very nicely matched my idea of what a nine foot tall woman who was very fit might look like. And her costume was very naked, but not entirely naked. Perfect, really, for me.

There were just three things I had to work with to make her work entirely for me. One: that face. It's just wrong. Especially the eyes. Not sure what went wrong, but her eyes are a mess and her jawline is too firm. Her lower face looks like it's just a hairline away from growing a beard. (That's when I realized what the artist's problem was. It wasn't a bad drawing. Red hair, staring eyes, incipient beard: she's French!)

I decided not to do any work there, it would just take too long to fix her face to something more Geena Davis-ish. (Geena Davis is the actress I based the character of Gina on, in terms of voice and mannerisms, plus she's got an athletic build and is tall). Sometimes “Let it be” is your best shot, and the rest of the body is so nice and Big.

Two other problems. I'm sure you spotted one of them: underboob. It was an easy fix. I created a new layer first, because you can adjust transparency on a new layer if you need to, a handy trick as you will soon see. I just borrowed the color from her bra and followed the existing contours of her breast to get the shape. I had initially thought I would have to digitally erase the metal border on the underside of the bra (talk about an underwire!) but when I covered up the border with the red bra color and dialed the transparency on the layer just a little, the the border showed through but was properly colored, looking very much like a seam in the fabric of the bra. Perfect!

If I were a REAL artist I might have created a new metallic border on the underside of the bra, but I'm pretty sure most viewers wouldn't notice and I KNEW that I didn't care. So, no metallic border.

There was one more bit that was needed to comply with Amazon nudity standards, but harder to spot. Amazon wants NO vaginal area on display, and if you'll look carefully at Gina's crotch, there's a bit of flesh between her inner thigh and the edge of the sex cachet she wears. It's not really vaginal area, but I'm not getting my book blocked over some detail on the cover like that. So I went in and added some red to cover that tiny bit of flesh. I doubt anyone would know, because it looks like part of the weird outfit.

All that was left was the background and the hair. I knocked it out using some alpha layer tomfoolery, which meant I didn't have to go in there and cut it out by hand. Only problem was, those wisps of hair that fringe her head didn't knock out perfectly, being wisps. That's OK, I went in there with the digital shears and trimmed them off, making it appear that her hair was styled. Voila! I had my Gina art. Well, French Gina art.

Laura was much tougher, but also more fun. She's based on a Second Life avatar, which meant I went into Second Life, pulled up an avatar, and took photos of her against a black screen to create my art. I also decked her out in a collar and cuffs, but decided to photograph her naked rather than look around for a skimpy bra and panties to put on her. Though I did buy a pair of cheap elf ears for her. Cost me $50 Lindens, which works out to roughly twenty US cents. I'm always willing to spend where it counts!

There are TONS of clothing options for avatars on Second Life, because residents make everything that exists in the game, including the very shape of the land and water itself. Godlike powers, indeed! Most central to the game's economic success is that you can create your own avatar skins, bodies, hair and most of all, clothes, clothes, clothes, clothes, clothes.

Yes, you can be a virtual clothing designer, makeup designer, hair stylist, etc., on Second Life and make money at it, in some cases, serious bank, since Lindens are tradable for US dollars as I pointed out earlier.

… wait … where's everybody gone? Aw, come on, buy my boooooook … Geeze.

Anyway, I could have bought a nice thong and bikini set, but it takes forever to find a skimpy one that really works. They come in two varieties, one that comes as painted-on art and for some reason has terrible jaggies, and one that is beautiful but takes a lot of effort to get it fitting right.

I wanted to get, insofar as possible, a naked look for Laura, and I have finally figured out how to draw lingerie on avatars and make it look right, and make it look naked. I started by taking about 50 photos of Laura naked but for collar, cuffs and shackles, looking for the right pose and the right angle of that pose. Another thing they make in Second Life is animations, and since slavegirls are popular roles in Second Life (because a lot of women enjoy submissive fantasies) there are also a lot of kneeling poses. I wanted one that showed Laura's adoration of Gina, and when I got what I wanted, I did the alpha channel process and got a nice clean cutout, as seen on the left. Notice that in this one, even the wisps of hair came out clean.

The first thing I had to fix was Laura's right breast. It was lumpy and smaller than I wanted. The breasts are built from polyhedrons, and when you enlarge the breasts, the polyhedrons enlarge and become more visible, and I had Laura's breasts pumped up as it was. (There are tools called “sliders” that let you enlarge, shrink and otherwise change body parts at a whim, if you are using the basic Second Life body.)

I wanted Laura to be curvy because she was so small, and if I made her at all slender, she'd look … childlike. And in the erotica genre, that is a third rail: touch it and die. I wanted Laura to be very womanly-looking for that reason, and so I used a circle tool that created a breast-shaped circle to make Laura curvier, and filled it with the appropriate flesh tones just by copying the existing flesh tones over. (Her hips were already nice and round, and it was more subtle work, so I left them as is.)

Before I could go covering up her breasts with clothing, I used the clone tool to place generic flesh tones over the nipples, then used the smear tool to even out the tones so that at the end, her breasts were nipple-free. Yay. I did the same with the bit of genitals and pubic hair that were visible. Very easy work.

Then I created a new layer and used a combination of circle tools and following the existing lines of her body, to create the outline of her top and her panties. I didn't bother making it super-realistic, I just wanted it to look good and emphasize Laura's curviness. That's where the circles came in handy. They make the artwork look polished and smooth, but it's just using the circle tool and making it grow a border, then filling in the border for the appropriate part of the circle in your design. Between the circle tracing and following existing contours, I did very little free-handing, but I'm very pleased about the undies I drew, as they accentuate Laura's curviness further.

Once I had the outlines drawn, I filled them in, with the bra and undies on their own separate layers. I used flat white and it didn't look at all realistic, until I started adjusting the transparency on the layers. Once the overlays were sufficiently transparent, the modeling on the body underneath came through, basically shading the undies for me, and doing it exactly right, without any effort on my part other than adjusting a slider.

When I was through, I had a very nicely modeled, non-naked Laura. After that it was just a bit of touch-up. By far the trickiest part was the eyes, which in the original are looking downward, whereas I wanted Laura looking upward, at Gina. Also, there's a definite goofy look there if you zoom in close. I just copied the corneas, painted over where they'd been with white eyeball color, and flipped them upside down, positioned them as I wanted so that Laura looked up, then drew in some irises to get rid of that dead “doll-eye” look, and added a couple of reflections, just white dots in the irises. I also rounded out Laura's right shoulder, as it was looking a bit lumpy.

 I made the leash the same color as the center of Gina's fist, and made it a simple line running from her hand to the ring on the front of Laura's collar. I kept it as simple as possible, as it wasn't supposed to be a major feature of the artwork, just something to visually symbolize the relationship between Gina and Laura. I used the circle and line tools to make the way the leash hung look natural, once again.

I had found a nice bit of vaguely spooky and magical looking background art and a stone walkway in Second Life, which has sandboxes for that sort of thing, and I pasted Laura and Gina into it. I painted a bit of shadow underneath Laura to anchor her to the background, and that was it. The muted gray color made Gina and Laura really pop from the background, which is what I wanted, two sexy mostly naked women. Hopefully, the cover will help sell the book.

All in all we are talking a good ten, fifteen hours of work for me, if I'd been able to just sit and do it. I spent two and half days at it, two of them weekend days. A real artist could probably have put something better looking together in about an hour. Maybe two at the outside. Hire a pro if you can afford one, but the good ones don't come cheap, and the bad ones, well, some of them make me look good by comparison, and a lot of the bad ones have been known to use copyrighted images for their content. That's a legal spanking!

(Note: “Tiny, Big” is already selling well, and I've just gotten started promoting it. I'm thinking the cover worked.)

Time Travelling Bondage Models: Part Two

Left: Closeup of a portion of the cover of Mystic Comics No. 8. Right: Unknown tumblr image of a bondage model.
So I found the image on the right on a tumblr bondage photo blog, sans attribution, as usual. It reminded me of something, and after a bit I figured out what: one of the photos from my section on the Competitors of Wonder Woman, specifically, this one, Mystic Comics No. 8, from March 1942.

Clearly, the photo was created well after the comic book cover was inked, yet the resemblance is too amazing not to be true! The only rational explanation is that the model somehow traveled to the past to model for the cover of Mystic Comics No. 8! It sounds fantastic, I know, but it wouldn't be the first time I've obtained evidence of this happening. And c'mon, SyFy Channel "woo" series have proven everything from the existence of ghosts to ancient astronauts to aliens to the plot to save Hitler's mustache from the atomic bomb with far weaker "evidence" than this very strong resemblance between a cover on an old comic book and an obscure bit of bondage porn!

P.S.: I did a Google reverse image search and was able to only turn up websites of the sort that do not attribute and which have viruses and similar stuff, as my anti-virus program bragged to me on one or more occasions that it had detected specific kinds of malware. So tell me if you know of the origin of this image, but tread carefully if you go looking for more like it.

P.P.S.: You will note I have yellow circles over the woman's breasts. They are wrapped in rope and are all purple. I know some people like that stuff, but I don't, and I'm not putting it on my blog.


The original cover of Mystic Comics No. 8 in all its BDSM porno glory. Remember, this was a children's comic, sold in newsstands and stores everywhere without plain brown wrappers or anything ... just like those Margaret Brundage magazine covers. My how things have changed. Can you imagine that on a modern comic book cover?

Coming Soon: A New Book By Pat Powers

Just the cover art for now.