Book Covers

E Books

The Hilary Long Mysteries by Margaret Cooper Evans

Physical Books

For Abbadon / Solaris books in Oxford

 

For NuovaStella books in Hook Norton

 

The Hilary Long Mysteries - books 1 to 7

The first book called " Upsidedown in Overdown " started out as quite an easy brief.
A mysterious female A1 "wasp" with expensive tastes and a black ponytail walking down a country lane towards her new life.
Could I find a decent reference of this lady? No I could not!
Could I find the right sort of country lane - Cotswoldy but not geographically obvious? No I could not!
In the end I built a human mesh to the correct physical proportions, dressed her in Victoria Beckham style suit and Christian Louboutin shoes. Then in Photoshop I added clothing detail and Louis Vuitton luggage.
The background was made from three separate images with sections cloned, brightened and otherwise manipulated to make it look like a single photo. I hope you like the result, personally I think the legs still look too plastic.

Aaargh - Just noticed... Louboutin shoes always have red soles!!! - bit of a boo boo there methinks!

Margaret Evans's "Jago"

Here is the new book cover for Margaret Evans' first novel "Jago".

It is the story of love, loss and redemption set amongst the dramatic Cornish coast fishermen and upcountry broadcast journalists during the Bosnian wars of the late 1990's.

The main character was completely hand painted in Photoshop and the background of the Cornish fishing town of Moushole was manually "cloned" in oil using Corel Painter.

The whole image took about 20 hours.

I am still not happy with his right eye (the left one as you look at it). The brief was that it should be an open smile to show an open heart. It was really difficult not to make the smile one of those "dead" smiles you get when at family events where the photographer takes too long and we all say chee - eee - eee - ese til our smile muscles set like stone and our eyes glaze over

Here are a couple of work in progress images. Unfortunately my method of merging layers before using the blend tool to smooth out the skin tones meant there work no real work layers to go back to in order to show you the process.

The initial sketch

and here is the initial dawb over. Stupidly I worked on the same file and relied on Windows not corrupting the file or me doing something stupid and iretrevable. Thakfully everything worked out well!

Paul Kiarney's "Hawkwood and the Kings" and "Century of the Soldier"

Here are the hi res images for the covers of Paul Kiarney's  "Hawkwood and the Kings" and "Century of the Soldier" as well as the full page add in 2000ad Megazine.

All work was done in 3DS Max. These are the raw renders before any touch-up or Photoshop work. The images have been resized from print resolution but are still about 2500 pixels in width so follow the photobucket link above if you dare!

I have also added a couple of images that were used as reference / inspiration for the helmets for comparison.

Hawkwood and the Kings

reference

Century of the Soldier

reference

Full page advertisment

And here is an overview of how the Prussian Courassiers helmet was made. monarchies-3d-how-it-was-done.html

As for the mace, here is an in production render of the head followed by the hand drawn texture and normal map for the inner circle recess.