Category: Art

The Dreaming: Rough Cover

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I’m now working on some rough covers for “The Dreaming”. This is my preferred cover, but the art director didn’t like it at all at first (the b&w version, that is). Luckily, with a bit of colour and the blurring effect, he seems to like it more now (I’ll still have to colour his choice in). Since this one didn’t take me long to do (about 4 hours), I’m going to be doing an extra cover or two so marketing can have a choice. The runners-up can be used for the next book.

This was done in Corel Painter 9 – I’m sure people would remember my adventures with this a few weeks ago. After having it for a month, I STILL couldn’t get the watercolour feature the way I want. I’m beginning to suspect the reason is not the software, but because I’ve never done watercolour properly in my life. That may explain why I can never get the effect I want no matter how I tweak it. I find myself growing fond of the airbrush function instead… So far, the grand total of all 3 cgs done in CP9 was airbrushed. Perhaps I should just stop spending my hours on watercolour attempts and try acrylics or other medium instead.

Remember, this is a very rough draft. And a Merry Xmas to y’all!

 

The Dreaming - Rough Cover

Update: Another Airbrushed Picture

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I was meaning to try out the watercolour function in Corel Painter 9, but I can’t understand how it worked (am I the only one with these sort of problems?). I was trying to imitate the style of another artist I found online, and was using their picture for reference, but I couldn’t figure out how they did their colouring. I LOOKED sorta like watercolour, but it probably wasn’t… anyway, I couldn’t get the watercolour working, so I tried to imitate the effect with airbrushing instead. And the result, the girl below with the rent-a-frame, looks NOTHING like what I want it to be. But at least it’s a different colouring method to the first airbrushed picture I did. Definately less “cute”. I could probably use this colouring style for “The Dreaming” pin-ups. Discovering new colouring styles are fun (even if that wasn’t my intention in the first place).

 

Painter Girl

 

The original picture was a lot lighter than this one – I played around with the Gamma in Corel Photo-paint, and decided it looked much better with darker colours. I discovered the “sponge” tool and the “Airbrush – FineSpray” functions today. 🙂

CategoriesArt

Update: I got Corel Painter 9

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I finally got my hands on Corel Painter 9! And guess what, I don’t know what most of the functions do. I spent at least 4 hours yesterday attempting to try airbrushing for the first time, and it turned out surprisingly well for a first attempt. I was expecting pure garbage to result so I scanned some crappy sketch in and just coloured it – this is a grown-up Tilis from Keeper of the Soul. The background is pretty forgettable – I didn’t have a background in mind when I scanned in the crappy sketch and so had a rent-a-moon and rent-a-starry sky taken straight from Amber’s “The Dreaming” pic further down this page (Amber: you biatch!).

 

Tilia

 

I had to port the background into Corel Photopaint and add it in there. I have no idea how to add glows to the characters in Painter – or perhaps you can’t do it at all?! I tried to look through the “help” part but no luck. If anyone knows, please tell me, it would be greatly appreciated. And I don’t understand why the “select” function is such a pain in the butt. At least you can actually PAINT in this program.

CategoriesArt